More Than 10,000 Refugee Children Missing In Europe
KABUL: (MEP) At least 10,000 unaccompanied refugee children have disappeared after arriving in Europe in the past two years, EU’s criminal intelligence agency announced.
However, many are feared to have fallen into the hands of organised trafficking associations, according to EU officials.
Europol chief of staff Brian Donald told Britain’s Observer newspaper the vulnerable children had disappeared from the system after registering with state authorities following their arrival in Europe.
Donald said 5,000 children had disappeared in Italy alone, while another 1,000 were unaccounted for in Sweden adding that a sophisticated pan-European “criminal infrastructure” was now targeting refugees.
“It’s not unreasonable to say that we’re looking at 10,000-plus children. Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with, Donald stressed.
IOM and UNICEF data for 2014 indicates more than 23,000 asylum applicants in Europe were unaccompanied minors or children separated from their families.
But in the first 10 months of 2015, Sweden alone received applications from over 23,000 unaccompanied and separated children. Asylum statistics, however, do not account for all migrant children.
In October, officials in Trelleborg, southern Sweden, revealed that some 1,000 unaccompanied refugee children who had arrived in the port town over the previous month had gone missing. On Tuesday a separate report, again from Sweden, warned that many unaccompanied refugees vanished and that there was “very little information about what happens after the disappearance”.
The Observer reported that Europol found evidence of links between smuggling rings bringing people into the EU and human trafficking gangs exploiting migrants for sex and slavery.
Over one million migrants and refugees, many fleeing the Syria conflict, crossed into Europe last year.
“Whether they are registered or not, we’re talking about 270,000 children,” Donald told the paper.
