In yet another discovery of migrant smuggling in North Macedonia, nearly 150 people were found squeezed into two separate trucks. That's according to police, which earlier said they detained a total of 567 migrants trying to transit North Macedonia without papers in July alone.
Police in North Macedonia said 11 migrants sustained serious injuries in a car accident that happened Sunday near the town of Shtip. It’s the third migrant car accident the country has reported in one week.
The Italian Consortium of Solidarity (ICS) is calling on authorities in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which borders Slovenia, to not create alarmism over possible COVID-19 contagion due to the arrival of refugees on the Balkan route.
Up to 60 migrants remain missing after a boat capsized on Lake Van in south-eastern Turkey over the weekend. So far, only six bodies have been recovered from the site.
Around 1,000 additional police officers were dispatched to Slovenia's border with Croatia on Tuesday in a bid to prevent illegal border crossings. Officals said they have detected an increase of migrants on the Balkan route in the past weeks.
The EU agency Frontex has reported that the number of irregular border crossings on Europe's main migratory routes in January and February 2020 rose by 27% compared to the same period last year.
InfoMigrants spoke to several migrants from Northern African on the Turkish-Greek border, who converged there after Ankara announced that the borders would be open. Among them was Mounir, a 43-year-old Moroccan from Casablanca, who says he soon felt disillusioned when he saw the border remained closed.
Humanitarian conditions have deteriorated considerably near the Turkish-Greek border one week after the Turkish government threatened to "open" of the gates to Europe. Many migrants turned back by Greece or stranded in the Turkish border town of Edirne are now considering leaving the area.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has warned that the migration crisis between Turkey and Greece could lead to an increase in migrant flows and Bosnia could have to deal with up to 10,000 arrivals a day.
Malta is experiencing a record number of migrant arrivals in 2020, as 883 people have already arrived in the first two months of the year. That figure is around 16 times higher than the number of arrivals in the same period in 2019.
Ninety migrants were picked up by British authorities as part of a large search and rescue operation, according to UK media reports. Most of them were rescued from rubber boats in the waters between France and England.
The number of migrants arriving in the Spanish Canary Islands increased last month to 18 times the number in January 2019, the AFP news agency reports. However, fewer migrants are trying to reach mainland Spain by boat.