Suspicious object found at German chancellery

BERLIN — Police say they’re checking a suspicious object found during a routine security check at the entrance to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office in Berlin.

Federal police spokesman Thorsten Peters said the main entrance to the chancellery in downtown Berlin was closed off Wednesday while authorities checked the object. He declined to give more details on what the object was.

The chancellery wasn’t evacuated. Merkel was due to lead a regular Cabinet meeting Wednesday morning.

Merkel has been warning against a wave of anti-Arab sentiment in her country, following Germany’s taking in some one million asylum seekers in 2015.

On Tuesday German leaders expressed shock over dozens of apparently coordinated sexual assaults against women on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne blamed on “Arab-looking men,” but warned against anti-migrant scapegoating.

Merkel called for a thorough investigation of the “repugnant” attacks, ranging from groping to at least one reported rape, allegedly committed in a large crowd of revellers during year-end festivities outside the city’s main train station and its famed Gothic cathedral.

Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said she had called Cologne’s mayor, Henriette Reker, to express her “outrage” over the violence, which she said required “a tough response from the state.”

“Everything must be done to find as many of the perpetrators as possible as quickly as possible and bring them to justice, regardless of their origin or background,” Seibert quoted Merkel as saying.

Police in Cologne said they had received 90 criminal complaints by Tuesday and quoted witnesses as saying that groups of 20-30 young men “who appeared to be of Arab or North African origin” had surrounded victims, assaulted them and in several cases robbed them.