Body of young refugee washes up on Turkish beach

The Coast Guard officers who rushed to the site after being alerted by a Greek armed forces patrol recovered the girl’s body and rescued 12 people, reported Xinhua news agency.

Fifteen babies and children were among 34 refugees who died when their boat capsized off the small island of Farmakonisi last Sunday.

The Turkish coast guard rescued all others on the boat, including eight children.

Tensions rose Saturday in the northwestern Turkish city of Edirne, where around 2,000 migrants have been blocked by police from reaching the nearby border with Greece for almost a week.

As many as 500,000 migrants have crossed into Europe fleeing war-torn and poverty-stricken nations in the Middle East and Africa; the majority seek asylum from civil war in Syria, which has continued for over four years and claimed more than 220,000 lives.

Only few weeks after the images of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi shook the world, local Turkish authorities said that a four-year-old girl, who is not yet identified, was found lifeless on a beach in the Aegean town of Cesme in Izmir province.

But two weeks later European Union members are still at odds over how to accommodate the tens of thousands of new arrivals.

Croatia declared it was overwhelmed and began busing migrants in convoys back to Hungary and closing its border crossings with Serbia.

The crossing to Greece from Turkey takes less than an hour and as little as 20 minutes, depending on which beach the boat sets out from.

Some of the refugees and migrants didn’t know when they arrived that some European countries had put in place measures to control the flow but expressed their determination to go anyway.

Meanwhile, Dutch prosecutors said they had arrested two Syrians suspected of operating a large people-smuggling ring that brought hundreds of Syrian refugees into Europe.