Four Syrian migrants arrested after 9 underage girls attacked | World | News
German police are investigating a spate of sexual attacks on at least nine young girls at an outdoor swimming pool. Police in the state of Hesse said that nine girls, aged 11 to 17, had come forward to report being touched at the Barbarossabad swimming pool in the town of Gelnhausen on Sunday.
After the alleged attack, it’s reported that several of the girls approached staff at the pool around 5pm, claiming they had been touched by a group of men in the whirlpool area of the swimming baths. Bild reports that four suspects arrested by police are Syrian nationals aged between 18 and 28 years old.
Criminal charges have been filed against all the males, and they have been banned from the pool.
According to Bild, a spokeswoman for the Southeast Hesse Police Headquarters in Offenbach confirmed the nationalities of the men arrested over the incident as Syrian.
The newspaper said five schoolgirls had come forward with reports of sexual assaults, but when their accounts became known publicly more girls also approached the police. “Currently, we have nine girls”, the publication said a police officer said.
On Friday German lawmakers voted to suspend family reunions for many migrants, part of a drive by the new conservative-led government for a tougher approach to migration.
Parliament’s lower house voted 444-135 to suspend the possibility of family reunions for two years for migrants who have “subsidiary protection,” a status that falls short of asylum.
At the end of March, more than 388,000 people living in Germany had the status, which was granted to many people fleeing Syria’s civil war.
New Chancellor Friedrich Merz made tougher migration policy a central plank of his campaign for Germany’s election in February. Just after he took office in early May, the government stationed more police at the border and said some asylum-seekers trying to enter Europe’s biggest economy would be turned away.
The bill approved Friday is the first legislation on migration since Merz took office. It will suspend rules dating to 2018 that allowed up to 1,000 close relatives per month to join the migrants granted limited protection, with authorities making case-by-case decisions on humanitarian grounds rather than granting an automatic right for reunions.
