Foreigners made up more than half of all gang rape suspects in Germany last year, while 80% of victims were German citizens, according to new data.
The statistics, released this week by the federal government in response to a request by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, showed there were 751 gang rapes in 2025, involving 772 victims.
Of the 1,087 suspects, 53% did not have German citizenship, although non-citizens make up less than 17% of the population.
The data did not include details about the background of the foreign citizen suspects, but previous studies analysing the names of gang rape suspects have shown that up to 75% are committed by those with non-German first names.
Dual citizens are also recorded as “German” in federal crime statistics, although late last year the country’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, said it would begin recording multiple nationalities.
The gang rape data showed that the nationalities with the highest number of suspects after Germans were Syrians (110), Afghans (64), Iraqis (46) and Turks (44), while the areas with the largest number of gang rapes were North Rhine-Westphalia (161), Berlin (118) and Lower Saxony (113).
Of the 772 victims, exactly 80% (619) had German citizenship, including 54 men and 565 women.
According to the data, 72% of solved cases involved suspects who were previously known to police, which AfD politician Stephan Brandner said “demonstrates a blatant failure of the judiciary, security authorities and politicians”.
“This requires consistent prosecution, faster procedures, harsher sanctions and – in the case of foreign perpetrators – consistent termination of residence,” Mr Brandner told WELT.
“Only in this way can women be effectively protected from such acts.”
Earlier this year a youth centre in Berlin was accused of covering up alleged gang-rape of a schoolgirl because they feared the suspects would be labelled “typical Muslims”, and the local youth welfare office also failed to report the assault.
Header image: A Syrian who was jailed for five years last month for gang raping a woman in Dusseldorf (Bild).
