Ralf Jaeger says that recent arrivals in Germany were among the suspects.

He accused Cologne police of making "serious mistakes". More than 500 criminal complaints have been filed - 40% alleging sexual assault - relating to 31 December. The scale of the assaults on women in Cologne and other German cities has shocked Germany.


Mr Jaeger, the state interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, is himself under political pressure. On Friday he fired Cologne's police chief Wolfgang Albers. Addressing a committee of state MPs on Monday, Mr Jaeger criticised the police for not calling for reinforcements on the night, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events.

His report detailed how a group of around 1,000 men of North African and Arabic origin gathered in the area around Cologne's cathedral and main station in the evening of 31 December. From this large group, smaller groups of men formed, who then surrounded women and threatened and attacked them, he said.

These smaller groups were predominately made up of North African men who had travelled to Cologne from different cities. The suspects included asylum seekers who had arrived in the past year, he said. Around 1.1 million asylum seekers arrived in Germany in 2015.

There was however no mention of the role that drunken, provocatively dressed women played in the events of New Year's eve in the city. Young men fleeing war and traumatized by their travels were confronted by women dressed in a way that they would not be familiar with outside of brothels.

The women themselves and their menfolk must accept some of the responsibility.