At least nine girls, aged between 11 and 17, have reported being sexually harassed at an outdoor pool in the German town of Gelnhausen.
Eyewitnesses and local authorities say the victims were groped by a group of four young men while in the pool’s whirlpool area.
Police identified and detained four suspects, aged between 18 and 28, described as Syrian nationals, who belong to the same family.
The pool’s management acknowledged that, at first, they had not believed the initial set of girls who had complained to staff that they had been touched all over their bodies in the whirlpool by a group of several men.
Only after more victims came forward were the police alerted.
Mayor Christian Litzinger (of the centre-right CDU party) was criticised for trivialising the incident after he said that “at high temperatures, tempers are sometimes on edge.”
Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the right-wing AfD party said:
The trivialisation of sexual assaults against our children is not only difficult to bear. It also shows that the CDU has no interest in changing anything.
Mass brawls and scenes of migrant men behaving aggressively at Germany’s outdoor pools have become a regular occurrence in recent years.
