GERMAN police have described a series of sexual assaults against women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve as “a completely new dimension of crime”.

Officers received numerous complaints from women who said they had been assaulted around Cologne’s main train station next to the western German city’s famous cathedral on the night from Thursday to Friday.

Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers says witnesses described the assaults as coming from a group of up to 1000 men whose appearance indicated they were of “Arab or North African origin”.

Some 60 criminal complaints have so far been filed, including one allegation of rape.

‘Katja L’, 28, told Der Express: “When we came out of the station, we were very surprised by the group that met us there”. She said the group was “exclusively young foreign men”. Keeping close to her friends, they pressed on:

“We then walked through this group of men. There was an alley through [the men] which we walked through. Suddenly I felt a hand on my buttocks, then on my breasts, in the end, I was groped everywhere. It was a nightmare. Although we shouted and beat them, the guys did not stop. I was desperate and think I was touched around 100 times in the 200 metres.

“Fortunately I wore a jacket and trousers. a skirt would probably have been torn away from me”.

German news agency dpa quoted Albers telling reporters on Monday that it was “an intolerable situation that such crimes are committed in the middle of the city.”

Police have identified 80 victims of the gangs, 35 of which were subjected to sex attacks. Others were assaulted or robbed, Breitbart reports.

Political leaders including Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the attacks, though many also warned against hasty conclusions about the perpetrators. But to some Germans already uneasy about the one million asylum-seekers their country took in last year the incident seemed to confirm simmering fears.

“Is this the ‘cosmopolitan and colorful’ Germany that Merkel wished for?” asked Frauke Petry, leader of the nationalist party Alternative for Germany.

Petry’s party, known by its German acronym AfD, has called for a clampdown on the number of asylum-seekers allowed into the country, a sentiment shared among a growing number of supporters in Merkel’s own center-right bloc.

“It’s unacceptable that women are sexually molested and robbed by young migrants on the streets and public squares of German cities at night,” said Andreas Scheuer, general secretary of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian wing of Merkel’s party.

“Whoever won’t accept our rules for living together, including respect for women, can have no place in our society here in Germany,” said Scheuer. His party has called for a cap of 200,000 asylum-seekers in Germany a year, a demand its lawmakers are likely to repeat at a meeting with Merkel on Wednesday.

Others in Germany cautioned against tying the refugee question to the issue of street crime when the full facts of the incident aren’t known yet.

“It’s completely improper ... to link a group that appeared to come from North Africa with the refugees,” Cologne’s mayor Henriette Reker told reporters after a crisis meeting with police Tuesday. Syria, Albania and Kosovo were the top three countries of origin for asylum-seekers in Germany last year.

Cem Ozdemir, a Green Party lawmaker of Turkish origin, described the attacks as “horrible and deeply misogynist.”

“Women must feel safe everywhere, no matter where or when,” he said.

Before the New Year, some German towns reportedly cancelled fireworks displays so as not to upset migrants who might associate the loud noises with the sounds of a war zone.

The attacks are reminiscent of the assault on 60 Minutes journalist Lara Logan, who was on assignment in Egypt 2011 when she was brutally sexually assaulted by a group of up to 300 men who surrounded her as she prepared a live report from Tahrir Square.

“There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying ... I thought not only am I going to die, but it’s going to be just a torturous death that’s going to go on forever,” she later said in an interview.

As her cameraman was changing a battery, Egyptian members of her film crew heard people in the crowd talking about wanting to take Ms Logan’s pants off.

“Our local people with us said, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here’,” Logan said. “That was literally the moment the mob set on me.

“For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands.”

Four years after the attack, Ms Logan, who has returned to work, still suffers medical complications as a result.