EU border agency: Migrants hit new monthly record in July

Greek authorities are planning to add more ferries to the route linking the islands of the eastern Aegean to the port of Piraeus and elsewhere on the mainland in a bid to ease pressure on the islands which are on the front line of an influx of migrants.

The Reuters caption story on 8 August 2015 mentioned that migrants from Bangladesh sit outside their makeshift shelter near an abandoned hotel packed with refugees and migrants.

That monthly number is greater than the 43,500 who arrived in Greece for all of 2014, it said. It was not clear what boat they had been on.

Anatolia said that three people, including a child, were rescued from the hull by Turkish divers.

Some refugees pay smugglers up to $1,200 each for the crossing, travelling in the middle of the night to avoid Turkish and Greek coast guard vessels. One shop owner said she was going through 100-150 of the devices a week.

Many are unable to swim and so buy cheap life jackets or even children’s inflatable toys and rubber rings designed for swimming pools to provide some hope of survival should their dinghies sink.

Those who drowned were attempting perhaps the safest, shortest sea crossing in the risky journey to Europe, for the Greek island of Kos is only 2.5 miles from Turkey at its closest point.

A spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in Geneva said the EU should help Greece but that Athens, which is struggling with a debt crisis, also needed to show “much more leadership” on the issue.

Some 250,000 migrants have already crossed the Mediterranean this year to Italy and Greece, and the worldwide Organization for Migration said Tuesday it expected that number to pass 300,000 by the end of the year.

IOM estimates nearly 2,350 people have died this year in those sea journeys.

“A dramatic increase in the number of refugees arriving in Lesbos and a lack of available space on ferries to the mainland risks leaving thousands stranded and overwhelming the limited support on the island“, the IRC said in a statement.

There were chaotic scenes on the island of Kos last week, where local police locked migrants in an outdoors athletics stadium to process them. “Most of them, fleeing instability in their home countries, initially entered Greece from Turkey”.

Bangladeshi migrants have been passing days in inhuman condition at makeshift shelters on Greek island of Kos for past two weeks, says a Reuters caption story.

“This country doesn’t have the financial resources or the infrastructure to get through this in a dignified manner”, said Olga Gerovassili, a government spokeswoman.