Jan Peter Bechtluft, mayor of the German town of Papenburg, has expressed fury after a 26-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested for sexually molesting a ten-year-old girl at a local shop.

The Papenburg mayor said: “For people who commit crimes, there can be no right to asylum.” His comments come after a pair of Sudanese asylum seekers in their 20s were arrested by police on suspicion that one of them had sexually molested a ten-year-old girl by grabbing at her chest, Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung reports.

Police spokesman Achim van Remmerden also told German press that the 26-year-old asylum seeker had been arrested a week prior to the sex attack after getting overly intoxicated with a group of other asylum seekers. The man is said to have attacked and injured police officers on more than one occasion in the past.

The sex attack occurred in the toy section of the Kaufland supermarket according to officials. They say that the man approached the ten-year-old, molested her, and then fled the scene after employees called the police. He then returned to the shop later in the day with another asylum seeker and the pair attempted to steal items by putting them under their clothes.

When officers arrived on the scene, they overpowered the two resisting asylum seekers and brought them into custody. “In the subsequent review by the police, the two perpetrators made considerable resistance by kicking and hitting. In addition, the policemen were spat on,” police said.

Mayor Bechtluft took to Facebook after the incident writing: “A handful of criminals now discredit more than 800 refugees in our city.”

The incident is only the latest in a slew of sex attacks by migrants, often on underage children. The most common locations for sex assaults have been in swimming pools, music festivals, and asylum homes.

In October last year, a group of Syrian asylum seekers were caught sexually molesting girls aged between nine and 14 years old. In June of this year, a similar case occurred in which two other Syrian asylum seekers, aged 27 and 31, were arrested on suspicion of filming underage girls and sexually attacking them in an outdoor pool in Löbau.

Asylum homes have also seen cases of sexual abuse of minors. A recent case involving a Ghanian man, who is accused of sexually abusing a ten-year-old, was said to have been covered up for weeks by authorities in the German town of Herford.