A mob of nearly 1,000 people threw bottles at police at a street fair near Stuttgart, Germany last weekend. Two women were sexually assaulted during the incident. From Deutsche Welle:

Guests and police were attacked with bottles thrown from a crowd of some 1,000 young people during the night to Sunday, police said. They said groups of 30 to 60 rioters then left the castle park where the festival was taking place and continued to make trouble in the center of the town. A police spokesman said on Monday that the violence against officers was “horrifying,” adding that the aggression had taken on a new quality. He said the excessive consumption of alcohol had played a large role in the violence… Two young women, one aged 25 and the other 17, were also sexually harrassed at the festival, according to police. A 20-year-old Iraqi man was being questioned in connection with the first case, while three Afghan asylum seekers aged from 18 to 20 were detained over the second.

It’s worth noting that Der Spiegel reports there were actually four incidents of sexual harassment, so maybe the number of attacks is higher. The sexual assaults, allegedly by asylum seekrs, are drawing comparisons to the infamous flurry of sexual assaults that took place on New Year’s Eve in Cologne back in 2015. There were reportedly 1,200 assaults that night, including hundreds in Hamburg, the site of the G20 riots. A significant number of those assaults were carried out by foreign nationals.

With regard to the rioting, an initial police report indicated the crowd was made up of many people with an immigration background. That claim was reported by Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, the Daily Mail and the Local. However, a report by the Associated Press indicates police have since disputed it:

Police said about 1,000 youths gathered in a town park. Some of them threw bottles at police and two police vehicles were sprayed with graffiti. Police said earlier reports that a lot of youths with immigrant roots were involved in the confrontation were not true.

It’s curious that the initial reports the police are now disputing appear to have come from the police themselves. I’ve looked for an explanation of this turnabout but, so far, I haven’t seen any. How did the initial police report get this wrong? When did police realize it was wrong?

Just over a week ago I wrote about the violent, left-wing riots that took place in Hamburg, Germany, the site of the G20 Summit. I also wrote about the national discussion about left-wing violence that was taking place in the country as a result of those riots. It’s still too early to say what happened near Stuttgart exactly. Maybe this was just a crowd of drunk Germans. But some of the anti-police behavior and the behavior of a subset of the crowd running riot in the town sounds a lot like the riots we just saw in Hamburg.