Spanish police arrest Pakistani man for promoting militancy

German authorities question three Pakistanis over concert assaults

MADRID/ BERLIN: The Spanish police arrested a man from Pakistan on Tuesday for promoting militants via social media while the German police questioned three more Pakistanis for allegedly assaulting women at a concert.

Spain’s Interior Ministry said the Barcelona police arrested the Pakistani, who had been promoting the actions of various groups operating in the conflict zones of Syria and Iraq, especially Dai’sh.

Spain has so far detained 24 people this year over suspected links to militants.

Meanwhile in the German city of Darmstadt, police briefly detained three Pakistanis after 26 women reported sexual assaults at a music festival over the weekend.

German police said Tuesday that mostly young women, who between them have filed 14 criminal complaints, said they were encircled and groped by groups of men in ways that recalled mob attacks at chaotic New Year’s festivities in Cologne.

“The women have reported the (perpetrators) appeared to be men from the South Asian region,” police said in a statement. Three Pakistani men aged 28 to 31, and at least two of them asylum seekers, were arrested at the four-day, open-air music festival in Darmstadt but later released.

The incidents drew comparison with the Cologne attacks on New Year’s Eve, committed in a crowd of mostly Arab and North African men.

The assault appalled Germany and sharpened public concern about the arrival of over one million asylum seekers last year, mostly from the Middle East.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 1^st, 2016.