Migrants hit new monthly record in July — EU border agency

Almost 110,000 migrants have been tracked getting into the EU in July by irregular means, official knowledge confirmed on Tuesday, setting a record because the inflow continues, notably of Syrians reaching Greek islands from Turkey.

The escalating refugee crisis in Greece is continuing, with migrant arrivals accelerating “dramatically”, the United Nations warned today, urging the Greek Government to strengthen reception facilities and services and for wider Europe to bolster humanitarian coordination.

HUMANITARIAN AID: The German Red Cross says it will distribute hygiene kits to migrants to try to prevent disease from spreading as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos.

Lazar said planned penal code amendments would soon make illegal border crossings and cutting through the 4-meter (13-foot) high fence being built on the 174-kilometer (109-mile) border with Serbia punishable by several years in prison.

It is just one of the costs for the migrants, with some paying around $1,200 (1,000 euros) per person for the journey across the Aegean in an inflatable dinghy.

Other EU data shows 625,920 people claimed asylum in the bloc previous year.

There were chaotic scenes on the island of Kos last week, where local police locked migrants in an outdoors athletics stadium to process them.

Greek authorities say they are planning to use a ferry now docked at the island of Kos to transport up to 2,500 migrants to a northern port. It pitched a tent for a psychologist to offer support for people there, many of whom have fled violence in their home countries, but dozens of migrants quickly turned this into another place to sleep, she said.

The debt-ravaged country has said the huge influx is too much for it to handle alone and has pleaded for more EU help.

The responsibility must be “shared on many shoulders”, he told the Die Welt newspaper, insisting it was “unsustainable” for Germany, along with Sweden, to take in the majority of refugees.

The number of migrants and refugees who have landed in Greece by way of the Mediterranean since the beginning of 2015 totalled 160,000, including figures from the sharp increase of arrivals in recent weeks, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) revealed on Tuesday.

SMUGGLERS: In Italy, authorities detained eight suspected smugglers in the deaths of 49 migrants trapped inside the hold of an overcrowded fishing vessel over the weekend.

Turkey’s official Anatolia news agency meanwhile reported Tuesday that 24 migrants had been rescued after a boat overturned after leaving Turkey’s Bodrum peninsula for Kos. “All we do here is wait”, the 18-year-old said at the abandoned Captain Elias hotel, a two-story building with a crumbling exterior where hundreds of migrants fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Asia have found temporary refuge.