BERLIN, June 7 (Reuters) – Migrants in Germany committed or tried to commit some 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016, according to a police report that could raise unease, especially among anti-immigrant groups, about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal migrant policy.
There was a record influx of more than a million migrants into Germany last year and concerns are now widespread about how Europe’s largest economy will manage to integrate them and ensure security.
The report from the BKA federal police showed that migrants from northern Africa, Georgia and Serbia were disproportionately represented among the suspects.
Absolute numbers of crimes committed by Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis – the three biggest groups of asylum seekers in Germany – were high but given the proportion of migrants that they account for, their involvement in crimes was “clearly disproportionately low”, the report said.
It gave no breakdown of the number of actual crimes and of would-be crimes, nor did it state what percentage the 69,000 figure represented with respect to the total number of crimes and would-be crimes committed in the first three months of 2016.
