[20] By April 2016, statistics recorded by authorities indicated that out of the identified 153 suspects in Cologne who were convicted of sexual offenses and other crimes on New Year's Eve, two-thirds were originally from Morocco or Algeria, 44% were asylum-seekers, another 12% were likely to have been in Germany illegally, and 3% were underaged unaccompanied refugees.

German: #polizei #köln #leverkusen Ausgelassene Stimmung – Feiern weitgehend friedlich – Infos unter https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/12415/3214905 There are conflicting accounts about when reports of sexual assaults during New Year's Night 2015–16 first reached the Cologne police.

[26][11][15][36][13] The German public service TV broadcaster ZDF, though, did not report on the Cologne developments at all in its news bulletin Heute Journal on 4 January 19:00, for the reasons that they could not yet find an eyewitness willing to talk on camera,[30][37] nor confirmation of the ethnicity of the suspects.

[30] The news bulletin Tagesschau at 20:00, from the German public-service TV broadcaster ARD, however, did report on the Cologne events, including the police statement that the offenders, judging by their looks, had come from the Arab or North African regions.

[1][56] In the afternoon of 5 January 2016, several women reported to the police in Frankfurt am Main that they had been sexually assaulted on New Year's Eve, in one case by a group of ten "North African" men speaking poor English with Arabic accents.

[71] In September 2016, in response to a question from a newspaper, the Staatsanwaltschaft (state attorney) declared that 60 reports of sexual harassment of women on New Year's Eve in Frankfurt, mostly perpetrated by groups, had been brought before them.

[28][81][83] A high commissioner of the Cologne police deployed at the scene that night contended in Die Welt on 7 January that at 21:45 the crowd on the plaza and cathedral steps was randomly shooting fireworks and throwing bottles, "mostly men with migration background", counted already "several thousand", and kept growing until 23:00.

[41] A report from the end of February 2016 by the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Police) stated, the groups were mostly between 9 and 100 men, encircling lone women, sexually assaulting them (groping, rape, and insults), often combined with robbery and theft.

The local newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger on 1 January at 13:21 reported sexual harassment on New Year's Eve near the Central Train Station,[31] and so did the Cologne paper Express that day at 21:08,[32] but neither mentioned ethnicity of the perpetrators.

[36] The public-service TV broadcaster ZDF at 19:00 that day, in its news bulletin Heute Journal, completely skipped the item of the Cologne sex assaults because they had not yet found an eyewitness confirming the alleged ethnicity of the assailants.

[26][41][15][30][11][39] Former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU) on 5 January suggested that "the public media" for days had ignored the events,[92][non-primary source needed][37] and more commentators and right-wing politicians criticized the press.

[96][97] Since those New Year's Eve events, that press codex has been revised in 2017,[98] and both political scientist Schroeder and newspaper Die Zeit have suggested that since 4 January 2016, the German mainstream media may now mention an ethnic background of crime suspects more easily.

"[103] On 8 January 2016, it was discovered by police that one of the suspects had prepared himself for contacting or harassing women, with Arabic–German translations written on a piece of paper for phrases like: "beautiful breasts", "I want sex with you" in a coarse idiom, and "I kill you".

[43] On around 15 February, the British online newspaper The Independent stated that of the first 73 identified suspects accused of robbing or sexually harassing women or committing other offences on New Year's Eve in Cologne, only three were refugees.

[115][116][117][118][119] The Bundeskriminalamt (German Federal Criminal Police Office) on 10 January asserted that the phenomenon of communal sexual harassment is known in several Arab countries, where it purportedly is called taharrush gamea.

[125] Likewise, on 13 January, 22 German feminists pleaded in an open letter that the anger after the Cologne incidents should not be directed against groups or ethnicities like Muslims, Arabs, blacks, and North Africans; sexualised violence is omnipresent every day and not only a problem of 'the others' who are not white 'non-Germans'.

[129][130] After parliamentary inquiries lasting from March until November 2016, the SPD fraction in the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament concluded again that "the deployment of the security forces in the Silvesternacht (New Year's Night) in Cologne had gone wrong, with grave consequences for the women affected".

The liberal conservative German magazine Cicero, in more guarded terms, blamed the migrants by suggesting "the government's loss of control" on who enters Germany had caused these New Year's Eve's sexual assaults.

[154] North Rhine-Westphalian Interior Minister Ralf Jäger (SPD) said on 7 January 2016 that the police have to learn from these events and "conceptually adjust" to the fact that groups of men can assault women en masse.

[159] This has induced the public perception of refugees as violent ‘Others’ who do neither fit to the German culture, nor to the European world of values, having led to a ‘global Islamophobia’ with xenophobic articles about that night available in almost every country.

[17][166][167] On its 9 January front cover, the German magazine Focus showed a naked blonde white woman, stained by black handprints all over her body, accompanied by the text: "After the sex attacks by migrants: Are we still tolerant or already blind?

[135] A similar picture was published on the cover of the Polish weekly paper Sieci in early 2016: a blonde woman, wrapped in the European flag, grabbed from several sides by dark, hairy arms.

[169] The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 13 January 2016 published a cartoon, recalling the Kurdish-Syrian three-year-old boy Alan Kurdi who, in September 2015, while fleeing with his family from the Syrian civil war, had drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.

[196] In November 2016, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed, that because of those crime scenes in Cologne having been both dark and overcrowded, those video images had mostly proven to be of poor quality and therefore not very helpful for the investigations.

[68] On 26 January, the Hamburg police published a photo taken with a surveillance camera of a 33-year-old Iranian man[197][198] who was suspected to have groped two young women on New Year's Eve,[199] which led to him being recognized by one victim and his subsequent arrest.

[113] As of 6 April 2016, the Cologne police had traced 153 suspects in relation to various offences on New Year's Eve; 149 of them were foreigners, with 103 of this group from Morocco or Algeria, 68 asylum applicants, 18 others presumably illegally living in Germany.

[210] In Hamburg, in response to photos being published on 20 January 2016 of two suspects of sexual assaults on New Year's Eve,[59] a 29-year-old male migrant from Afghanistan living in a refugee centre, was arrested the next day.

[4] In late January 2016, police in Frankfurt were investigating ten men suspected of pickpocketing, but not directly sexual violence, on New Year's Eve near the Eiserner Steg footbridge in the city centre.

[71] Eventually, all criminal proceedings in Frankfurt concerning sexual violence on New Year's Eve had to be dismissed due to lack of sufficient substantiated suspicion against specific persons, as declared in September 2016 by a spokesman of the Staatsanwaltschaft (state attorney).

[227] On Helsinki's Senate Square (Finland), where 20,000 people had gathered for New Year's Eve 2015–16 celebrations, women had complained to "security personnel" about asylum seekers groping their breasts and unwelcomely kissing them, as the police reported.