Jan van Aken, the co-leader of the German Left Party, has claimed that the most prominent cases of gang rape involved all White men during his appearance on a German podcast show hosted by Ben Berndt. Remix News is fact-checking his claim.
“So let’s start with gang rape. So the most prominent cases we know of are all white men. Epstein, gang rape, Gisele Pelicot in France, gang rape, all by white men,” said Jan van Aken, the co-leader of the German Left Party.
His claims about Gisele Pelicot being “gang raped” by “all white men” are rated as false.
🇩🇪🔴Fact Check: German far-left leader claims most high-profile gang rape suspects are all White men.
“Let’s start with gang rape. So the most prominent cases we know of are all white men. Epstein, gang rape, Gisele Pelicot in France, gang rape, all by white men,” said Jan van… pic.twitter.com/UFLwW2CS5g
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) March 17, 2026According to the analysis of names in the case, 12 have Middle Eastern/North African names, plus the 3 names associated with sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands. This means 27.5 percent of the 51 suspects are likely non-White. It also cannot be determined with 100 percent accuracy if all the French names on the list are White individuals. No photographs of the convicted men have ever been officially published. Not only is this far from “all” the suspects, but Middle Eastern and North Africans are estimated to be only 10 percent of the French population, which means they were significantly overrepresented in the rape of Pelicot.
Among the names of the North Africans and Middle Easterners are: Nizar Hamida, Karim Sebaoui, Ahmed Tbarik, Husamettin Dogan, Saifeddine Ghabi, Mohamed Rafaa, Abdelali Dallal, Mahdi Daoudi, Omar Douiri, Redouane Azougagh, Hassan Ouamou, and Redouane El Farihi. There were no doubt many White suspects in this case as well, but van Aken’s claim that they were all White men is entirely false.
Regarding Epstein, while the charges in the case are reprehensible, nobody has been specifically convicted of gang rape in the case. There are numerous allegations that Prince Andrew committed gang rape but his case remains under investigation. The case involving Sean Diddy Combs, which while not as prominent as the Epstein affair, also involved numerous allegations of gang rape as well, all involving African American suspects, further invalidating van Aken’s claim that the most high-profile cases only involve White men.
Van Aken further states: “Gang rape exists, it’s a huge problem. But to pretend that this is a migration problem, I would put a big question mark over that.”
The German statistics paint an entirely different story. Germany-wide, approximately 50 percent of all gang rape arrests involve foreign nationals, which predominantly come from North African, Middle Eastern, and sub-Saharan African countries. However, if the data is truly analyzed, the incidence of non-White suspects is much higher. Many of the individuals with a foreign background are German citizens, yet, when they commit a rape, it is included in the “German” category as the country does not keep crime statistics based on race.
To circumvent this crime data reporting issue, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has often requested the first names of all gang rape suspects, with the data illustrating that the prevalence of non-White suspects is often much higher than the official statistics would suggest.
For example, in North Rhine-Westphalia, an analysis of the names of gang rape suspects revealed that 50 percent of the German suspects had foreign names, indicating that in total, close to 75 percent of all gang rapes were committed by foreigners or those with a migration background. In other words, White suspects are in the minority, despite making up the clear majority in Germany.
🇩🇪🚨 Last year, police in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia arrested 155 suspects in connection with 209 cases of gang r*pe.
A total of 84 suspects were foreign nationals and 71 were German citizens.
At the request of the AfD state parliamentary party, the state… pic.twitter.com/Nc3DwTje1o
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) September 3, 2024Going further, van Aken tries to misdirect away from the issue by citing two high-profile rape cases, Epstein and Pelicot, which had nothing to do with his own country, Germany. However, if only high-profile gang rape cases in Germany are examined, once again, van Aken is revealed to be spreading disinformation.
Here is just a sampling of some of the most high-profile gang rapes in Germany over the last 10 years:
Cologne New Year’s Eve 2015/16
Approximately 2,000 men participated in mass sexual assaults on over 1,200 women across multiple German cities. The perpetrators were predominantly men from North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) and the Middle East who had recently arrived as part of the 2015 migrant wave.
Many of the women were forcibly gang raped by large crowds of non-White males. The scale of the attacks and the initial reluctance of police and media to report on them caused a massive political storm and directly led to Germany rewriting its sexual assault laws in 2016
Freiburg 2018
An 18-year-old woman was drugged inside a discotheque by a 22-year-old Syrian Kurd and then raped outside the building by a series of men. Eight perpetrators were convicted — seven Syrians and one German — while two additional men were convicted for failing to aid the victim.
The case intensified the national debate over migration and the deportation of criminal asylum seekers. The defendants comprised one German citizen, eight Syrians, two Algerians, and one Iraqi. The main suspect, a 22-year-old Syrian Kurd, was already the subject of unenforced arrest warrants for other crimes at the time of the attack.
Emma S., 2019
A 15-year-old girl was lured into the bushes on a September night and raped by 11 men, two of whom also filmed the attack in September 2019. Two of the named perpetrators, Arsen K. and Fares L., filmed the attack.
Based on available reporting the group was predominantly of migrant background, consistent with the broader Freiburg-area cases of that period.
Hamburg Stadtpark, 2020
Nine men and boys gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in a Hamburg park over several hours in September 2020. All were under 20 at the time, meaning they were subject to juvenile law. Only one — an Iranian national who was 19 at the time — spent any time in jail. The case later made headlines again when a 20-year-old woman was sentenced to a weekend in jail for calling one of the rapists a “disgraceful rapist pig” on WhatsApp — a harsher punishment than most of the perpetrators received.
All nine convicted men reportedly hailed from Afghanistan, Armenia, Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Libya and Poland. Four of the defendants were German nationals, while four others held Armenian, Afghan, Kuwaiti and Montenegrin citizenship. Only one, the Iranian national, received a prison sentence.
Görlitzer Park, Berlin 2023
Three African men were charged with the rape, grievous bodily harm, and aggravated robbery of a 27-year-old Georgian tourist. One of the suspects was a 21-year-old Somali man who had been traveling illegally in Germany since 2016 under eleven different identities.
A second was a 22-year-old man from Guinea-Bissau, said to have had four other identities and a criminal record across nine cases.
Mallorca rape, 2023
In 2023, after the international media loudly trumpeted that five German men were arrested for raping an 18-year-old Spanish girl, it was quickly revealed that all of the men have a “migration background.” Nevertheless, the vast majority of news outlets referred to the men as “Germans,” and most made no mention of the fact that the men had a migration background, with many outlets even referring to them as a “German pack.”
While Spanish news outlet Ultima Hora reported that the 21- to 23-year-old suspects were of Turkish origin, much of the Spanish press was fixated on the “German” aspect of the crime, which the men allegedly filmed on their smartphones. Even the German press was quick to claim the men were Germans with no context, with Welt, one of the most popular conservative papers in the country, running the headline “Five German vacationers on Mallorca have to be remanded in custody.” At no point in the piece does Welt mention the migration background of the suspects. The same story was told throughout the international press, with Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, and the Daily Mail making no mention of the men’s migration background.
Regarding more recent cases, these are a just a small sampling:
Heinsberg, 2025
A 17-year-old girl was lured by her ex-boyfriend to an apartment where five Syrian men between 17 and 26 were waiting. She was raped while threatened with a Taser. A pistol was also found during the subsequent search. The investigation later expanded to three separate rape cases after more victims came forward.
Dresden gang rape, 2025
Three Syrian men allegedly raped a 27-year-old woman on the hood of a car in Dresden, with one of the defendants subsequently complaining about being assigned a female interpreter during proceedings.
Herford, 2024
In 2024, a drugged 18-year-old was raped by seven suspects inside a parked vehicle in a fast food restaurant car park. The suspects included two Iraqi nationals — considered the main suspects — one German-Syrian, and four others with German citizenship (migration background unknown). The two Iraqis were remanded in custody. Police investigated the use of knockout drugs administered to the girl inside a nearby dance hall before the attack.
In fact, despite van Aken’s claims, non-White suspects are vastly overrepresented in the most high-profile cases in Germany. Remix News has covered these stories for years, and many of them have been extremely high-profile cases in Germany, even if van Aken conveniently ignored them during his interview.
Just days after van Aken’s podcast interview, a case made national headlines after it was revealed that nine suspects sexually assaulted and even raped a Turkish-Kurdish schoolgirl at the Gropiusstadt youth centre in Neukölln. Nine boys of Arab descent took turns molesting the same girl in a back room while one boy stood guard in the doorway. Instead of going to the authorities, staff gave female visitors a “safeword” to use when threatened and removed the door from the back room. The internal justification, according to sources who spoke with Bild, was to avoid having the young people immediately labelled “typical Muslims.“
Claims that migrants are simply younger males, which accounts for their higher crime rate, are also revealed to be misleading. Data shows that even when comparing the same age groups, migrant males feature drastically higher levels of criminality. Even when comparing some groups of women, they also feature higher rates of criminality than German men.
