Salzburg women report NYE sexual assaults

From the Austrian edition of The Local

Several women in the Austrian city of Salzburg have said they were sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve . . . Austrian police have confirmed that they are investigating a number of complaints and that so far three men have been arrested in connection with the reported assaults.

A 23-year-old man is alleged to have molested a young German woman in central Salzburg, and then went on to set off fireworks in the direction of a 17-year-old, who was slightly injured in the abdomen. Police said in a statement that the man was of Syrian nationality.

…several other women came forward to tell Salzburg police that they had been sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve. A 22-year-old said that she was harassed by a group of men on Residenzplatz in the heart of the city, who groped her and then stole her mobile phone. She told police that the group consisted of around eight to ten men who all seemed to be foreigners.

Two men arrested for separate assaults were both from Afghanistan.

“State police are currently investigating whether these were organized attacks and if there are any connections between individual perpetrators or groups of perpetrators,” police spokeswoman Valerie Hillebrand said on Thursday. She added that the fact that news of the attacks has only just emerged was not because police had tried to conceal them, but that the victims had only been encouraged to report what had happened to them after reading about similar attacks in Germany.