Germany’s AfD faction has released a list of forenames of all 2023 gang rape suspects in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), claiming that it demonstrates that the majority are of migrant heritage. The data, acquired through an application for information release not found in normal government data releases, reveals a clear trend in the forenames of those identified as suspects in gang rapes within NRW.
In 2023, there were 209 reported ‘gang rapes’ in NRW, according to a publication by the state’s interior ministry, in response to questions posed by two parliamentarians from the right-wing populist, anti-mass migration AfD. Although there is no actual definition of gang rape under German law, research was facilitated by examining reported rape cases where suspects were recorded as not working alone.
Out of 155 identified suspects, 71 are German citizens. This suggests that known migrants are responsible for over half of the attacks. However, when the forenames – which can be released in line with German privacy law, if not the surnames – are studied, it is claimed that a massive 76 per cent of suspects are of foreign heritage. A separate analysis of the same data by German newspaper Die Welt finds that even when counting out all “doubtful” name cases such as Jason or Luca, 78.1 per cent of suspects “in all probability had a migration background.
AfD politicians Markus Wagner and Enxhi Seli-Zacharias requested more detailed information after noting that there was a gang rape in NRW every 42 hours in 2023, questioning the usefulness of less informative official statistics regularly published. The most common city for gang rapes within NRW was Cologne, and the most common countries of origin for suspected gang-rapists were Syria, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
According to Wagner, “Like knife violence, beatings, Islamist attacks or groping in public swimming pools, the increase in gang rapes is not a matter of fate. This form of abuse, which often lasts several hours, is a crime imported primarily by unbridled migration.” The statistics came from the NRW AfD faction just days after they secured the release of other statistics pertaining to knife crime in the state, finding that 47 per cent of suspects were migrants.