12th body recovered from Aegean after sinking

At the other end of the country, 12 migrants drowned when their boat sank off the small Greek island of Farmakonisi, close to Turkey, in the early hours of Wednesday, a coastguard official said, while 26 were rescued and 12 more were missing.

Finland has announced stricter immigration policies to stem an influx of migrants, including opening repatriation centers for the quick expulsion of those denied asylum, tightening conditions for family unification and cutting benefits for refugees. It was not yet clear whether they were among those missing from Wednesday’s accident, in which a wooden boat carrying about 50 people sank.

“Greece can not become a warehouse of souls for people who don’t want to stay here”, Tsipras said. The bodies of the children, including a baby, were found on the coast of the province of Izmir in western Turkey, as the official news agency Anadolu reported.

Meanwhile, on Greece’s northern border with former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Greek police started moving hundreds of migrants that were stranded for days and blocking rail traffic.

The humanitarian workers were asked to leave the area during the operation while journalists and photographs were told to keep the distance of about three kilometers “to protect them from any possible violence, tension or threatening and aggressive behavior”.

Senator Mario Czaja said in a statement late Wednesday that a newly created office for refugee affairs will receive additional funding and staff to cope with the workload caused by the influx of migrants to the German capital.

Turkey has stepped up efforts to stop migrants from leaving for Greece by sea, and last week, authorities rounded up around 3,000 migrants and asylum-seekers from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria in the town of Ayvacik – north of Cesme – which is a main crossing point to the Greek island of Lesbos.

EU border agency Frontex recorded over 1.2 million illegal border crossings into the European Union in the first 10 months of 2015. The incidents come amid a new spate of deaths in the sea dividing Turkey and Greece, as the wave of migrants trying to reach Europe continues into the winter.

More than 230 people have drowned in Greek waters so far this year, as about 770,000 refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa crossed to the Aegean islands in flimsy boats provided by smuggling rings.

A total of 13 migrants, including seven children, were killed early on December 9 after two separate boats capsized off Turkey’s Aegean coast.

The UN refugee agency has also voiced concern for 12,000 Syrian refugees stranded at the border with Jordan. The victims’ nationalities were not immediately known.