Germany’s opposition party has blamed illegal migration for a surge in crime after it emerged that suspects in two fifths of violent offences are foreign nationals.

German police recorded six million crimes last year, a rise of 5.5 per cent.

Violent crime, in particular, shot up to a 15-year high, with knife crime, violent assaults and murder all increasing, national statistics released this week show.

More than four in 10 suspects in cases of violent crime were non-German nationals, a figure close to three times higher than the share of foreign nationals in the population as a whole, which stands at 15 percent.

Armin Schuster, interior minister in the state of Saxony, called on Olaf Scholz’s government to cap refugee numbers in response.

“This very negative development shows how strained our integration services are in terms of accommodation, language and work... we urgently need a migration cap for refugees,” said Mr Schuster, a member of the centre-Right Christian Democrats.

There was a steep rise in the number of migrants seeking asylum in Germany last year.

More than 350,000 asylum applications were made during 2023, five times the number made in the UK during the same period.

It is also the highest level seen since Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees in 2015.

‘Alarming but not surprising’

Alexander Throm, home affairs spokesman for the Christian Democrats in the Bundestag, described the figures as “alarming but not surprising” and a consequence of Mr Scholz’s “open” migration policies.

Lamya Kaddor, a Green Party MP in Mr Scholz’s coalition, said that migrants were over-represented in the figures because they tend to belong to the lower rungs of society.

“The crime rate is higher among socio-economically disadvantaged groups, which very often include foreign nationals,” she told Tagesspiegel newspaper.

Criminologists have warned against reading too much into crime statistics, stressing that they record suspects and not those convicted of crimes.

The far-Right Alternative for Germany party’s popularity rocketed last year during the boom in refugee arrivals.

Polling at 12 per cent at the beginning of 2023, the anti-immigration party reached 23 per cent by the end of the year.

However, the party has been damaged by revelations that members discussed a plan to deport more than a million migrants, plus accusations that senior figures have taken backhanders from Russia.

Last month, Czech media reported that the AfD’s two top candidates for May’s European elections took money from Russia in exchange for giving Putin-friendly interviews to the media.

AfD candidates Maximilian Krah and Petr Bystron have denied the accusations.