A MAYOR IN Belgium is seeking to ban male asylum seekers from the town’s swimming pool after complaints were received from female bathers.
Mayor of Kokzijde, a coastal town on the North Sea, Marc Vanden Bussche, suggested banning male migrant swimmers for a month after a 10-year-old girl was alleged to have been groped by a 23-year-old Iraqi man on Saturday.
The man was arrested but was subsequently released without charge reports the Gazet van Antwerpen.
“I do not think swimming is of vital importance for asylum seekers,” Vanden Bussche said, adding that he did not want his town to become a “second Cologne”.
The reference is to a series of apparently co-ordinated sexual assaults that took place in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve.
The move has been met with opposition from the Belgian migration minister Theo Francken who suggested that a pool ban would be the wrong thing to do.
“Punishing entire groups for the misconduct of a few has never been a wise course of action,” Francken said in a tweet.
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