On New Year’s Eve, in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of young men took part in what appeared to be an organized campaign of sexual harassment against about 90 women around the Cologne Cathedral. According to Reuters, on Tuesday, authorities described the events as “a new dimension in crime.”

At a news conference, Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers said about 1,000 young, mostly drunk, men, who looked to be from “the Arab or North African region,” split into large groups as officers entered a square on New Year’s Eve to stop fireworks from being thrown into a crowd. The gangs robbed, groped, and molested dozens of women, Reuters reports. One complaint “represents a rape,” Albers said.

Germany took in one million migrants and refugees last year, stirring resentment from reactionary groups. The leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party, Frauke Petry, tweeted, “Mrs Merkel, is Germany ‘colorful and cosmopolitan’ enough for you after the wave of crimes and sexual attacks?”

“It is time to send a signal,” the head of the nationalist Pro-NRW movement, Christopher Freiherr von Mengersen, told the New York Times. “We locals can no longer put up with everything that is being routinely swept under the rug based on a false sense of tolerance.”

Cologne, already an ethnically-diverse city, received nearly 10,000 refugees last year, the Times reports, including many young men from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. “There are no indications that this involved people who have sought shelter in Cologne as refugees,”said the city’s mayor, Henriette Reker, who was stabbed in October during a campaign event by someone who opposed her work with refugees.

She also described the attacks as “monstrous,” the BBC reports, and said, “We cannot allow this to become a lawless area.”

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.