City faces far-right Pegida rally as German government says 18 of 31 people identified were asylum seekers, but none suspected of sexual assault

Cologne’s police chief has been removed from his post amid criticism of his force’s handling of a string of sexual assaults and robberies carried out by groups of men in the German city on New Year’s Eve.

His enforced departure came as a witness to the violence told the Guardian the events appeared to have been coordinated. Lieli Shabani, 35, said she saw three Arabic speaking males who were “clearly giving instructions and directing a lot of the males”.

The city braced on Saturday for a rally of the far-right Pegida movement, one of the groups that point to the assaults as proof that chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal migrant policy is failing.

Police expect about 1,000 Pegida supporters and the local far-right group Pro NRW, as well as counter-demonstrators from the group “Cologne against Right-wingers”, local media said.

The protest is scheduled to start at 1pm in the central square where hundreds of women last week experienced assaults in violence that has shocked Germany.

Police chief Wolfgang Albers, 60, had been criticised for the handling of the violence, with a leaked police report describing this week how officers were initially overwhelmed by events outside the city’s train station, after which more than 100 women filed criminal complaints of sexual assault and robbery, including two accounts of rape.



Cologne police said on Friday that Albers is being sent into early retirement by the state government. They said North Rhine-Westphalia’s governing Cabinet will formally discuss the decision on Tuesday but Albers will not return to his job.

Albers had faced mounting criticism both for the police’s handling of last week’s events and of the fallout.

Cologne mayor Henriette Reker suggested on Friday that police had held back information from her, and said in a statement that her “trust in the Cologne police leadership is significantly shaken”.

The leaked police report, obtained by the German newspaper Bild, said women were forced to “run a gauntlet … beyond description” to reach or leave the station.

Shabani, the witness spoken to by the Guardian, said she had viewed the events from the cathedral steps, having gone to the city centre to experience her first German new year, eight months after arriving as a political asylum seeker from Iran. She said she had been astounded by the police’s nonchalance. “They seemed to just let it happen,” she said. “I watched as men fired large firecrackers horizontally into the crowd and they police just stood at the side of the square with their hands on their hips”.

Describing what she called “coordination tactics” among the men, Shabani said: “I watched for some time as three men who were smartly dressed gave out instructions. One time a group of three or four males would come up to them, be given instructions and sent away into the crowd. Then another group of four or five would come up, and they’d gesticulate in various directions and send them off again.”

The men occasionally paused to take selfies on their mobiles, she said, adding that they wore “sports chic” or “the type of clothing rappers might wear – smart trainers, baseball caps”.

“It looked to me like they were clearly directing the events,” said Shabani, describing the evening as “chaotic”.

The kindergarten teacher suffered a 5cm gash to her right hand, after intervening to stop a firework exploding in her three-year-old’s pram. “I saw it coming and put my hand up just in time to stop it,” she said.

Earlier, the German interior ministry said 31 people had been identified as being involved in the violence, of whom 18 were asylum seekers suspected of crimes ranging from theft to assault. None of the asylum seekers was suspected of committing sexual assaults of the kind that prompted outrage in Germany over the past week.

Plate said the vast majority of the criminal acts documented by federal police on the night were related to theft and bodily injury. Three were related to sexual assaults, but police had no names linked to them.



Of the 31 people identified, nine were Algerian, eight Moroccan, five Iranian, four Syrian and two German, plus an Iraqi, a Serb and a US citizen.

In addition to the 31 suspects, the arrest of two men from north Africa was announced on Friday morning in connection to the attacks. They were later released due to insufficient evidence of their involvement.

The incidents in and around the square in front of the main train station have led to accusations of a police and media cover-up to avoid anti-foreigner sentiment following Merkel’s open-door policy towards refugees and migrants. More than a million refugees have entered Germany in the past 12 months.

The chancellor said on Thursday the New Year assaults were unacceptable and that deportation policy needed to be continually under review “to send a clear signal to people who do not want to stick to our legal framework”.

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“The feeling women had in this case, of being at people’s mercy without any protection, is intolerable for me personally as well. And so it is important for everything that happened there to be put on the table.”



Merkel said she would change the law on deportations and increase police numbers. “We must also keep talking about the basis of our cultural coexistence in Germany and what people rightly expect is that actions follow words,” she added.

Victims have described their attackers as being Arab or north African in appearance but a Cologne lawyer joined a growing number of people on Thursday who insisted the description was incomplete.



“Clients I’ve spoken to who were there at the station to peacefully see in the new year say that there were also Albanian, Kurds, Montenegrins, Syrians and Iraqis involved in the tumult,” said Mehdi Labidi, a Tunisian-German.

Germany’s justice minister said asylum seekers could be deported if they were found to have participated in the attacks.

Evidence has emerged that similar attacks had taken place in seven other German cities. After Cologne, Hamburg appears to have been the worst affected. Out of a total of 167 complaints to police of attacks in the cities – around two-thirds of them being described as sexual assault, including two cases of rape – 100 relate to Cologne, and 53 to Hamburg.



Meanwhile, Finnish police reported an unusually high level of sexual harassment in Helsinki on New Year’s Eve and said they had been tipped off about plans by groups of asylum seekers to sexually harass women.



Helsinki’s deputy police chief, Ilkka Koskimaki, said: “There hasn’t been this kind of harassment on previous New Year’s Eves or other occasions for that matter … This is a completely new phenomenon in Helsinki.”



Security guards hired to patrol the city on New Year’s Eve told police there had been widespread sexual harassment at a central square where around 20,000 people had gathered for celebrations.



Swedish police said at least 15 young women had reported being groped by groups of men on New Year’s Eve in the city of Kalmar. A spokesman said groups of men encircled women on a crowded square and groped them. He said no one was physically injured but many of those targeted were terrified.