Despite growing public discontent and heightened debate over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming stance toward refugees, an American woman was rescued from being sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve in Cologne by a group of Syrian refugees.
After she got separated from her German boyfriend Sebastian Samer, who had both their cellphones and her wallet, 27-year-old Caitlin Duncan, a neuroscience student from Seattle, was groped twice by the mob that gathered near Cologne’s train station on New Year’s Eve. Describing her ordeal, Duncan, who sought help from the police but they were busy trying to clear the square, told The New York Times:
“One man grabbed my hat, took it off my head. Someone else came around the back of me and grabbed me. I guess looking for something in my pockets. I turned around, you know, to push him off me because he’s touching me. I turned to get my hat back, put it on; someone else tried to kiss my face and to kiss my neck. I pushed him away and yelled, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
“I thought, ‘This is a bit strange, but it is New Year’s and people are drinking too much — I’ll just find my boyfriend and leave’. But the police brushed me off and alarmed me more by shoving the crowd from the square. Then I thought, ‘This is really not good, I need to get out of here. But with the police again shoving back the crowd, all of a sudden, I was pushed back into this big group of people, eight or nine men, groping, pulling my hair. I went into a kind of fighting mode, and kicked and hit and pushed until I got away.”
As the crowd swelled and grew more unruly, she got scared — at 5-foot-2, she could hardly see in the crowd. At that moment, she started crying. That was when a stranger came up and asked if she needed help. But since Duncan and her Syrian savior knew limited German, he went to get his English speaking friend, Hesham Ahmad Mohammad, who was celebrating New Year’s Eve in Cologne with other Syrian friends.
“They first said, ‘OK, you can use our phone’,” she said, but she couldn’t remember her boyfriend’s number. Then they offered Duncan 70 Euros for a taxi back to her boyfriend’s home. But she wanted to stay and keep looking for him. She persuaded the men to form a kind of cordon around her so they could move through the crowd. She described her boyfriend to them, and they eventually found him inside the station.
EU states agreed to resettle 5,331 #refugees in 2015. They resettled 779 https://t.co/iqcgK1cc1G #refugeeswelcome pic.twitter.com/Nr2jC52RT6
— Amnesty EU (@AmnestyEU) January 16, 2016
Ahmad told PRI:
“I helped her because she was alone, and she was crying. I take hand of Caitlin. I make Caitlin behind me and I speak with high voice, saying, ‘If you want problem, I can make problem’. My friends hear my voice, they came to me, to be beside me. First of all I say to them, ‘We must make circle about Caitlin because somebody tried to kiss her or to touch her, she didn’t need that again’. Because I am Muslim, I cannot leave anybody who needs help alone. From my story people know there are good refugees, good people. They will help anybody.”
Ahmad Mohammad, a former primary-school teacher, had left Syria’s war embroiled Aleppo in 2014 for Turkey, and had arrived in Germany via the Balkans and Austria in September. He had left his wife and two sons in a village near the Syrian-Turkish border and was living in a small town near Cologne with two other Syrians, studying German as he awaited asylum.
Ahmad and his friends also felt unsafe on New Year’s, and blamed “bad boys” who had “lost their minds” on drink and drugs. He told The New York Times:
“We keep hearing news about refugees all day: ‘They are bad people, they must go back to their home’. When I hear that in the news, I am sad. Because we know that there were bad boys and bad people. But the good people, nobody speak about them… My friends and I are very happy because first of all, we help somebody. After that, we have new friends from Germany, the kind of contacts needed to start life here.”
According to The Telegraph, Angela Merkel has proposed toughening expulsion laws for foreigners who commit crimes. “The right to asylum can be lost if someone is convicted, on probation or jailed,” she said signalling a change in her “open-door” refugee policy as police admitted that a “majority” of those suspected of sex attacks in Cologne were asylum-seekers or illegal immigrants.
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