States of Germany

Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas said on Jan. 10 that the shocking spate of sexual assaults during New Year festivities in Cologne was organised.

Cologne police have said that the number of women claiming that they were assaulted on New Year’s Eve has risen to 379 with half of the cases reported involving crimes of a sexual nature.

Police said on Saturday that the number of cases reported to them had reached 379 and about 40 % of which involved allegations of sexual offences.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has proposed that asylum seekers on probation or who committed any kind of crime should be sent back to their countries of origin.

This comes after multiple sex attacks on women in the city of Cologne and elsewhere that took place on New Year's Eve and that were reportedly committed by men of North African and Arab appearance.

Thirty-one suspects, including 18 asylum seekers, are under investigation for offences including assault and theft in Cologne on New Year's Eve with the perpetrators of sexual assaults yet to be identified, Germany's interior ministry said Jan. 8.

Ferocious talks emerged in Germany and other European countries over the sexual assaults against women occurred by men of Arab or North African origin on New Year Eve’s  in five German cities and other cities in Europe.

German people demand explanations from German authorities about the handling of the attacks and ask them to reveal the identity of the perpetrators.

Asylum-seekers could be deported if they're found to have participated in a string of New Year sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany's justice minister said Jan. 7.

About 90 women have reported being robbed, threatened or sexually molested at New Year celebrations outside Cologne’s cathedral.

The police said the attackers were young, mostly drunk, men, describing the attacks as ‘a new dimension in crime’, as Reuters reports.

The U.S. Justice Department on Jan. 4 filed a civil lawsuit against Volkswagen AG  for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act by installing illegal devices to impair emission control systems in nearly 600,000 vehicles.

Germany only has capacity for a maximum 200,000 asylum seekers a year, about a fifth of the number it received in 2015, Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer said on Jan. 3.

Germany shut down two train stations in Munich about an hour before midnight on Dec. 31 following a tip from the intelligence service of a friendly country that the Islamic State of Iraq and te Levant (ISIL) militant group was planning a suicide bomb attack.