A leaked cache of confidential emails and notes passed between the North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) state government and local police has revealed the extent to which the force were placed under pressure to cover up the migrant sex attacks at New Year’s Eve.

Reportedly released to Cologne-based German newspaper the Express by an inside police source, the documents may imperil the position of NRW interior minister Ralf Jäger. The minister has been clinging to his position since the attacks first became known, days after the event, and even went so far as to fire his chief of police to “restore faith” in the city.

One of the documents sent by Jäger’s interior ministry to the police ont he first of January is a so-called “Important Event-Message” (“Wichtiges Ereignis-Meldung”). Far from the initial claims made, and statements made at an early press conference about the attacks the message confirmed the state government had full knowledge of the gang sex attacks.

The internal message explained there had been “Rape, sexual offenses, thefts, robberies committed by larger foreign Group” and that a “40- to 50-strong group of people” had been acting in the “downtown area” by the railway station “to the detriment of young women”.

Although it took days of exposure on-line and at news outlets such as Breitbart London to reveal the full scale of the attacks, the document confirms that the police were fully aware of what was going on. Describing the offences, it said: “The women were in this case surrounded by the group of people and groped above their clothing, jewellery stolen and was snatched. In one case, a 19-year-old German victim had fingers inserted into her body openings [vagina and anus].

“The criminal group was consistently described by the victims as North Africans, between 17-28 years of age. Investigations are continuing”.

In all, there were 359 complaints of sexual assault and rape on the night.

More damning than the revelation that police knew about the attacks and kept them from the public was the explicit order to play down the seriousness of crimes by the Interior ministry. An “internal police memo” which detailed “a request from the ministry” instructed police that they were to “cancel” the use of the word “rape” in their reports.

Speaking to the Express, a spokesman for minister Jäger admitted there had been “coordination meetings” between the government and police in the aftermath of the attacks. The paper called the notes and meetings nothing less than a “cover up”.

These revelations may make uneasy reading for minister Jäger, having already courted some controversy for firing his chief of police after revelations that officers were too overstretched to effectively control the migrant riot in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

Although the decision to sack the veteran officer was claimed to be over restoring faith in the force, just days later it was revealed the chief of police had foreseen trouble and appealed to minister Jäger for backup. The NRW politician turned down the request for more officers, exacerbating what was the most chaotic night in Cologne in decades.

Cologne police had initially claimed they had just 143 officers on duty on New Year’s Eve to police the whole city, leaving them severely under-staffed and forcing arresting officers to release suspects without charge as they lacked prison cells and police vans to hold them. In yet another embarrassing revelation it was discovered in March that far from those 143, the force had just 80 on duty.

As reported by Breitbart London, a spokesman blamed the discrepancy on “misinformation”.

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