Austrian Police Search Refugee Shelters After Sexual Assaults on New Year’s Eve

Austrian police are searching refugee homes for men who encircled women in the city center of Innsbruck on the night of December 31 and sexually assaulted them.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Austrian police are searching refugee homes in the western city of Innsbruck after 18 women said they were groped during New Year’s Eve celebrations, local media said Thursday.

Police commander Martin Kirchler said there were still no leads on who the attackers were, according to the Krone newspaper.

Police said suspects had been described as being of North African or Eastern descent. One of them had a broken tooth. Investigators believe the same group was responsible for numerous incidents.

Suspects are a group of five to six men who encircled women in the city center on the night of December 31 and sexually assaulted them. The victims were from Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Ernst Kranebitter, the chief of the investigative group, complained there was little evidence to identify the assailants. Three victims made photos of their attackers using cellphone cameras but, Kranebitter said, those were of very bad quality.

Similar attacks occurred in Vienna where three women were harassed, with four more women coming forward in Salzburg. This year’s events were reminiscent of what happened in the German city of Cologne last year when hundreds of women said they had been groped and robbed by men of foreign origin on New Year's Eve.