A German court Friday dropped charges against an Algerian man, the first to be tried for sexual assault associated with attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve, after the victim said she could not identify the defendant.
The panel said it had no evidence that the 26-year-old was part of a group of about 10 men who allegedly surrounded, groped and robbed the woman at Cologne’s central railway station.
The man was later found to be in possession of the woman's mobile phone, but he told the court that he had bought the cellphone from an acquaintance.
The court did find the man guilty of handling stolen goods and of a separate charge of breaking into a car last December and sentenced him to a suspended six-month jail term.
The Cologne attacks were attributed to crowds of mostly Arabic and North African men, and some media and far-right groups drew links between the assailants and Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis. Anti-migrant protestors invented slogans like "sex jihadists" and "rapefugees" to describe the more than one million mostly Middle Eastern asylum seekers in Europe, of which Germany has accepted the largest number.
The ugly scenes on New Year’s Eve also cast a harsh spotlight on Cologne’s police, who initially failed to prevent the violence then tried to downplay the extent of the chaos for several days.
As the attacks gained wider media coverage, more women came forward. Prosecutors have now received some 1,170 criminal complaints, including 492 accusations of sexual assault.
A key suspect in the Cologne sexual violence, a 19-year-old Moroccan man, is set to face trial after he was spotted shoplifting in southern Germany and arrested across the border in Switzerland last week.
Another Moroccan man is on trial in the western city of Dusseldorf over a New Year's attack there in which he allegedly groped an 18-year-old woman encircled by some 15 to 20 men.
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