Merkel migrant policy comes under fire

German Chancellor Angela Merkel came under mounting pressure Wednesday for her welcoming stance toward migrants, which opponents have linked to a shocking rash of apparently coordinated sex attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve. Police in the western city said they have received more than 100 complaints by women reporting assaults ranging from groping to at least one reported rape, allegedly committed in a large crowd of revelers during year-end festivities outside the city's main train station and its famed Gothic cathedral. Victims blamed men of "Arab or North African" appearance, enflaming a heated public debate about Germany's ability to cope with the asylum seekers. Germany registered 1.1 million asylum seekers in 2015, the interior ministry said on Wednesday, with Syrians fleeing a brutal civil war making up almost 40 percent of arrivals. Authorities have said there is no concrete indication that the perpetrators were asylum seekers who arrived in last year's record influx, whose total was confirmed by the interior ministry Wednesday. However critics of Merkel's liberal refugee policy charged that the Cologne assaults proved she was playing with fire without clear plans how to integrate the mainly Muslim newcomers. The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party, which hopes to gain seats in three regional elections in March, seized on the attacks as "a result of unchecked immigration." "Here we see the appalling consequences of catastrophic asylum and migration policies on Germany's everyday reality," party leader Frauke Petry said. Late Tuesday 200-300 people, according to police estimates, gathered in front of Cologne cathedral calling for more respect for women. One female demonstrator held a sign reading: "Mrs. Merkel, what are you doing? This is scary." "If asylum seekers or refugees carry out these kind of attacks ... it will bring their stay in Germany to an abrupt end," warned Andreas Scheuer, general secretary of Merkel's Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union, which has demanded she set a strict upper limit of 200,000 newcomers per year. Merkel was due to speak at a meeting of the CSU in Bavaria later Wednesday, just weeks after its leader Horst Seehofer gave her a humiliating dressing-down over her position on refugees at another party event. Meanwhile in Brussels, EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos was hosting an emergency meeting of ministers from Sweden, Denmark and Germany amid concerns for the Schengen passport-free zone after Stockholm and Copenhagen this week tightened their border controls due to the migrant crisis.