A 26-year-old Algerian man has become the first person arrested in connection with a string of sexual assaults during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne that sparked a debate about Germany’s ability to integrate migrants.



Prosecutors said on Monday the unidentified asylum seeker had been arrested at a refugee home in the nearby town of Kerpen over the weekend. He is accused of groping a woman and robbing her phone, the prosecutor’s office spokesma,n Ulrich Bremer, told the Associated Press.

Two other Algerian asylum seekers, aged 22 and 24, were also arrested in Kerpen and the western city of Aachen respectively over the weekend, both for robbery, said Bremer.

The number of people accused of committing crimes in Cologne on New Year’s Eve now stands at 21, of whom eight are in detention, he said.

Almost three weeks after the incident a total of 838 people have filed criminal complaints, including 497 women alleging sexual assault. Some of the victims have jointly filed a single complaint, so that the number of alleged crimes stands at 766, of which 381 are sexual offences, including three rapes.

The scale and nature of the crimes in Cologne, coupled with police descriptions of the perpetrators as being part of a large crowd of drunken men of “Arab or north African” origin, has fanned the debate about Germany’s approach to migration.

Europe’s most populous country and largest economy has borne the brunt of the continent’s biggest refugee influx since the second world war. Some 1.1 million asylum seekers arrived in the country in 2015, most fleeing war and poverty in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Monday Angela Merkel’s conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), agreed on Monday that Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia should be designated safe countries, cutting their citizens’ chance of being granted asylum to virtually zero.

The step was intended to reduce the number of arrivals from those countries and make deportations easier, the CDU’s Peter Tauber said after a meeting of senior party members.

