Police in Innsbruck are trying to identify a group of foreign men believed to have carried out the attacks. The women reported that a gang of men groped and tried to kiss them as they stood in or near a crowded central square for a concert and fireworks display. Witnesses in Innsbruck, a city in the Alps in western Austria, said the New Year's assailants were in their 20s or 30s and had dark complexions, but their nationality was not clear.
A police spokesman in the western province of Tyrol said: "It has definitely been proven that they are foreign. We have videos of poor quality but we are trying to make the best of them. The assaults happened despite a police presence reinforced because of the Cologne assaults and last month's truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, the spokesman said. Roughly 25, people gathered in the area of the central Market Square for a concert and fireworks display, visibility was limited, he added.
The police spokesman said: "We have never seen anything in this form. I cannot remember an attack of this intensity, on this scale and with this modus operandi. The attacks appear to echo events in Cologne in , when hundreds of women were sexually assaulted and robbed at New Year's celebrations and suspects were mainly of North African and Arab appearance. Protestors in Lepzig rally after over women were sexually assualted on New Year's Eve. Police there said they prevented a repeat of this year by screening mostly North African men on the night.
The attacks have seen a boost in support for the far-right in Austria and Germany after the countries took in more than one million migrants from the Middle East and North Africa during the migrant crisis.
Anti-immigrant sentiment has boosted support for far-right parties in both Austria and Germany after both countries took in waves of migrants, many of them from the Middle East and North Africa, during Europe's migration crisis in AFP Police in Innsbruck are investigating the attacks.
