RUTHFULLY YOURS

A 27-year-old witness named only as Anne told Spiegel magazine’s website she was shocked by the crowds when she arrived at the station with her boyfriend.

“The whole place was full and almost only with men,” she said. “Only a few frightened women, who were being stared at.”

A short time later, she said, she “felt the first hand on my behind”.

The men began firing fireworks directly into the crowd.

“I saw people jump and run, because a rocket had been fired at their legs,” she said.

“Shortly after midnight, the first women came to us,” an unnamed police officer told the local Express newspaper.

“Crying and in shock they described how they had been severely sexually harrassed. We went to look for women in the crowd. I picked one up from the ground. She was screaming and crying. Her underwear had been torn from her body.”

Although those behind the incidents have not been identified, they have been widely linked with the large influx of asylum-seekers to Germany.

One MP from Angela Merkel’s party called for the numbers of refugees in the country to be reduced in the light of the attacks.

“It can’t go on like this,” Steffen Bilger wrote on Twitter. “Urgently needed: reduction of influx, secure borders, intensifying of deportations and meaningful justice. #Cologne.”

There were allegations of a police “cover-up” on social media after it took five days for the scale of the incidents to emerge, with some claiming the authorities wanted to hide the ethnicity of the perpetrators to avoid social tensions.

An unidentified male witness told WDR television he and his girlfriend had been surrounded in Cologne by “drunk and aggressive” men who threatened them and groped her.

“They weren’t of European appearance,” he said.

“The crimes were committed by a group of people who from appearance were largely from the North African or Arab world,” Wolfgang Albers, the Cologne police chief, told a press conference.

“It is intolerable that such offences are committed in the heart of the city,” he said.

In Hamburg, witnesses described groups of young men who followed women calling out “Bitch! Ficky ficky!”

_{Cologne Cathedral (Photo: Rex Features)}

“Some girls were chased like cattle,” a 17-year-old woman told Bild newspaper. “I’m stunned that such a thing is possible in Hamburg. It makes you scared to celebrate in the neighbourhood.”

Police in the city said they had received six criminal complaints.

There have been suggestions that those behind the attacks may have been organised criminals using sexual assaults to distract their victims while they were robbed.

Some three-quarters of the criminal complaints filed in Cologne were for robbery.

“We know this sort of behaviour as a pickpocketing trick,” a police spokesman in Hamburg said. “But this phenomenon is unusual.”

Henriette Reker, the mayor of Cologne, has called an emergency meeting of the city authorities on Tuesday to address the incidents.

“We cannot tolerate a legal vacuum here,” Ms Reker said, describing the attacks as “outrageous”.

The state government of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Cologne lies, vowed to take action.

“We will not take gangs of North African men humiliating defenceless women with brazen sexual attacks,” Ralf Jäger, the state’s interior minister, said.