Refugee boats capsize: at least 27 people die in the Aegean

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Refugee boat in the Aegean Sea (archive image)

Photo: Orestis Panagiotou / picture alliance / dpa

More than two dozen migrants were killed in boat accidents in the Aegean before Christmas.

The Greek Coast Guard said on Saturday that at least 16 people died when a boat sank near Paros Island.

57 people were saved.

At first there was talk of three dead.

A few hours earlier, eleven people had died in another accident when their boat ran aground on Thursday evening.

According to the authorities, 90 people who were able to save themselves on a small island north of the island of Andikythira have been brought to safety.

According to the information, 27 children and eleven women are among the rescued.

A refugee boat sank not far from the Greek island of Folegandros on Wednesday.

At least three people were killed and dozen more are officially missing.

According to survivors, between 32 and 50 people were on board.

According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, the disaster off Folegandros was the worst disaster in the Aegean this year.

According to UNHCR estimates, between January and November this year more than 2,500 migrants died while sailing to Europe.

Since 2015, almost a million people, mainly civil war refugees from Syria, have reached the Greek islands from Turkey and thus the EU.

In 2021, Germany has become the main destination for asylum seekers in the EU to a greater extent than before.

This is reported by the newspapers of the Funke media group, citing new data from the EU statistical authority Eurostat.

According to this, a total of 355,955 first-time asylum applications were registered in the European Union in the first nine months of this year: 15 percent more than in the previous year.

In Germany, the number of asylum applications from January to the end of September rose more than twice as much, according to Eurostat: by 33 percent to 100,240 cases.

This means that 28.4 percent of all first-time asylum applications in the EU came from Germany;

In 2020, the German share was 24.3 percent.

According to Eurostat, other important destination countries for asylum seekers were France with 20 percent of applications (73,255), Spain with eleven percent (39,755) and Italy with eight percent (28,645).

Hungary comes in last with only 30 initial applications.

According to statistics, people from Afghanistan and Syria make up the largest groups among asylum seekers, followed by people from Pakistan and Iraq.

che / AFP / Reuters