Photos: AP
About thousands of migrants have been arriving in the mainland Greece, as the government prepares for talks on tackling the huge number of people reaching its shores.
Two ships carrying more than 4,200 passengers travelled to Piraeus port at night after leaving Lesbos island. The entire EU is ‘struggling’ to deal with an unprecedented influx of migrants.
Hundreds of people, mostly from the Middle East, continue to remain stranded outside a railway station in Hungary after police stopped them travelling through the EU.
The EU’s border control agency, Frontex, states that approximately 23,000 migrants arrived in a couple of previous weeks alone- an increase of 50% on the previous week. More than 160,000 people have arrived in Greece so far this year – already surpassing last year’s total. Also, more than 4,000 migrants arrived near Athens from the island of Lesbos
The country’s government says it lacks the resources to look after that many arrivals, but aid groups say authorities should be doing more.
On Tuesday, Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos called his French counterpart Francois Hollande and asked that the situation facing Greece be discussed at a senior European level. Greece’s caretaker cabinet is set to convene later on Wednesday.
Many of those arriving in the country do so on the island of Lesbos, where, according to the Kathimerini newspaper, around 17,500 migrants were noted and registered in the last one week. One ferry carrying 1,749 migrants travelling from Lesbos arrived in the port of Piraeus, near Athens, late on Tuesday. One of the passengers, a Syrian teacher named Isham, in his statement to the media said, “You have to help us. We are human.”
Another, with close to 2,500 on board, was due to arrive early on Wednesday.
Tags: Greece migrants
