Bombshell...

A sharp rise in the number of sexual assaults reported in Bavaria Germany, this year and many of the accused offenders are foreigners.

It is rare that a cabinet meeting in the Bavarian chancellery makes headlines across Germany. And when the state's interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, presented Bavaria's latest crime statistics on September 12, they seemed quite positive: fewer break-ins, less theft.

But then came the bombshell. The number of rapes reported in the first half of 2017, had increased by some 50 percent. Herrmann reported that 685 cases had been filed since the beginning of the year and that 126 of those involved foreign attackers.

That particular statistic represents a rise of 90 percent over the same period last year, with 60 more cases having been registered in 2017.

Those are shocking numbers indeed, but criminologists are not entirely willing to accept them as reliable. "The numbers are astonishing," said Ralf Kölbel, a criminal justice expert at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University.