|
 While the increase recorded by the European Union's border control
agency Frontex may be partly due to better monitoring, it
highlighted the scale of a crisis that has led to more than 2,000
deaths this year as desperate migrants take to rickety boats.
Italian police said they had arrested eight suspected human
traffickers that they said had reportedly forced migrants to stay in
the hold of a fishing boat in the Mediterranean as 49 of them
suffocated on engine fumes.
Some of those traffickers were accused of kicking the heads of the
migrants when they tried to climb out of the hold as the air became
unbreathable, prosecutor Michelangelo Patane told a news conference
in Catania, Sicily.
The dead migrants were discovered last weekend, packed into a
fishing boat also carrying 312 others trying to cross the
Mediterranean to Italy from North Africa.
 It was the third mass fatality in the Mediterranean this month: last
week, up to 50 migrants were unaccounted for when their rubber
dinghy sank, a few days after some 200 were presumed dead when their
boat capsized off Libya.
Greece appealed to its European Union partners to come up with a
comprehensive strategy to deal with what new data showed were 21,000
refugees landed on Greek shores last week alone.
A spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in Geneva
said the European Union should help Greece but that Athens, which is
struggling with a debt crisis, also needed to show 'much more
leadership' on the issue.
Greek officials said they needed better coordination within the
European Union. "This problem cannot be solved by imposing stringent
legal processes in Greece, and, certainly, not by overturning the
boats," said government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili.
Nor could it be addressed by building fences, she said.
"EMERGENCY SITUATION"
Hungary, which has attracted criticism from the United Nations
refugee agency with its plans to build a fence to stem an influx of
migrants, said on Tuesday it would send thousands of policemen to
patrol the southern border with Serbia.
Hungary reported detecting more than 34,800 people in July crossing
its borders from non-EU states, notably via Serbia.
Frontex said it recorded some 107,500 people arriving outside
regular channels in July, after a previous record in June of over
70,000, and more than three times as many as July last year.
The most active frontiers were those of the Greek islands in the
Aegean off Turkey, where nearly 50,000 people were recorded arriving
by sea, mainly on Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos.
[to top of second column] |
There were chaotic scenes on the island of Kos last week, where
local police locked migrants in an outdoors athletics stadium to
process them. On one occasion police sprayed fire extinguishers at
the crowds to keep them back.
The Greek state eventually charted a passenger ship to house and
process migrants in an attempt to ease conditions onshore, where
many are living in tents, some in shelters made from cardboard
boxes.
Nearly 340,000 such migrants were seen so far this year arriving in
the EU, mainly in Italy, Greece and Hungary. That was a 175 percent
rise on the same period last year and much more than the 280,000
registered arrivals in all of 2014.
Other EU data shows 625,920 people claimed asylum in the bloc last
year. Frontex officials were not immediately available to comment on
how far the increase in numbers being detected may be a result of
increased monitoring of the frontiers.
In Germany alone, which recorded 203,000 claims last year, officials
said on Tuesday they expect to register some 750,000 refugees this
year.
"Syrians and Afghans accounted for a lion’s share of the record
number of migrants entering the EU illegally," Frontex said in a
statement. "Most of them, fleeing instability in their home
countries, initially entered Greece from Turkey."
Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri said: "This is an
emergency situation for Europe that requires all EU member states to
step in to support the national authorities who are taking on a
massive number of migrants at its borders."
(Additional reporting by Isla Binnie in Rome, Gergely Szakacs in
Budapest, Michele Kambas in Athens and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva;
writing by Philippa Fletcher; editing by Robin Pomeroy)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
