As many as 26 young women may have been sexually abused at a festival in Germany, with the attackers employing pack tactics to surround and isolate girls before launching their assaults.

The method of attack, which separates women from their friends and leaves them vulnerable to sex attacks and theft, has led German newspaper Die Welt to liken the attacks to the mass sexual assaults outside Cologne central station on New Year’s Eve.

As of Tuesday morning, there were 18 official complaints made to police about attacks at the annual Schlossgrabenfest music festival in Darmstadt, Germany. That number had risen to 26 victims by Tuesday afternoon, with police still speaking to witnesses and complainants, who have been described as “very young”.

Some were so young, their parents reported the crimes to police, rather than the victims themselves. Police have not ruled out the possibility that more may come forward, according to reports.

According to a police press statement, three suspects were arrested at the festival after the girls they allegedly attacked went directly to police to complain. The men, who were arrested and released pending further investigations, are Pakistani “asylum seekers” aged between 28 and 31 years old.

A police spokesman said: “The perpetrators proceeded in small groups to surround and touch women immorally. The women said they had the impression the men were of the South Asian region.

“On Saturday on a completely packed dance floor in the area of HR Disco, [there was] sexual harassment of several women.”

The men were said to move in groups of ten.

Hans-Jürgen Irmer, member of parliament for pro-mass migration German leader Angela Merkel’s own Christian Democrat party was horrified at the news of the attacks, reports Junge Freiheit. He told the weekly conservative newspaper that the behaviour of immigrants in this case was “totally unacceptable”, and that if found guilty those men responsible had “forefeited his right to hospitability” from European peoples.

If convicted, he said the men should find themselves on the “first plane back to Pakistan”.

The Cologne sex attacks to which these latest alleged migrant crimes have been likened were an important factor in bringing to prominence in Germany the scale of criminality in the wake of the migrant crisis.

Breitbart London reported on the Cologne attacks in January as German police came to acknowledge the enormous scale of offending which, far from their original claims of having been a quiet and well policed night, actually saw a severely overstretched force unable to prevent over 1,000 alleged incidents of theft, assault, and sexual abuse.