Last Wednesday, the trial of four migrants accused of raping a 22-year-old woman in a park in Düsseldorf began at Düssledorf regional court.
As the Bild daily reported, the four migrants, who are amateur football players, were on their way from training when they saw a woman at around 9 p.m. on November 12, 2019, near the Volksgarten S-Bahn station.
According to the indictment, they walked her through Volksgarten Park under the pretext that they wanted to walk her home. Then, three of them are said to have attacked the woman and gang raped her while the fourth defendant filmed everything.
A witness saw the incident happening and alerted a police vehicle about the rape. The woman was subsequently given medical treatment.
At the police station, the men, two Brazilians aged 19 and 32 respectively, a 34-year-old from Morocco, and a 21-year-old from Angola, accused each other of committing the crime.
As the German courts guarantee special protection to the defendants up to 21 years of age, the courtroom was closed to the public shortly after the trial had started.
According to statistics from the German Criminal Federal Police (BKA), suspects without a German passport committed 35 percent of all crimes in Germany in 2019, which shows those with a migrant background represent a growing proportion of the country’s criminals.
Germany also saw an increase in sexual crimes in 2019, with 8,189 suspects listed as “non-German”, representing more than one in three sexual crimes (36 percent).
Past reports have also shown similar alarming statistics. The 2019 “Criminality in the context of immigration” report pointed to a 102 percent increase in the number of Germans who were listed as victims of a crime committed by a member of the immigrant community, which includes all those who entered Germany under the asylum system.
For example, in the category of “sexual offenses”, 3,261 Germans were victims in sexual crimes featuring an immigrant as the suspect while only 89 immigrants were victims of a German suspect.
