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At least 26 women who attended a four-day music festival in the western German town of Darmstadt this past weekend have reported that they were groped or sexually harassed, a police spokesman said Tuesday.
Several of the women said they had been surrounded by groups of up to 10 men, said Ferdinand Derigs, a spokesman for the Darmstadt police. “These people then approached the women, danced around them and touched them in an inappropriate way,” Mr. Derigs told the public broadcaster in the state of Hesse, where Darmstadt is located.
Groping “was apparently the main motivation,” Mr. Derigs said.
Crowds of 90,000 to 100,000 people attended each day of the festival, which ran Thursday through Sunday. Initially, the police received only a few complaints of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior. But the total of such reports grew to 26 by Tuesday afternoon, according to German news media reports.
German news media also reported that three men, including two Pakistanis who had recently sought German asylum, were detained early Sunday, apparently in connection with the episodes. But the reports added that all three were released.
Germans have become newly vigilant about sexual abuse and harassment at mass events since New Year’s Eve in Cologne, when hundreds of women reported being assaulted and often robbed by hundreds of men of Arab and North African descent.
In early May, several women attending an open-air cultural festival in Berlin also reported at least a dozen cases of abuse.
After Cologne, mass events like the traditional carnival processions in the Rhineland have been more intensely policed. A parliamentary inquiry into how matters deteriorated so badly in Cologne on New Year’s Eve is continuing.
(NYT)
