Two Turkish-flagged passenger boats carrying asylum seeker set sail from Lesbos to the Turkish town of Dikili as the sun rose over the Aegean Sea early on Monday, a Reuters witness said.
“All of the migrants returned are from Pakistan except for two migrants from Syria who returned voluntarily,” Giorgos Kyritsis, a spokesman for a government refugee crisis committee, told state TV.
Kyritsis said 136 people were deported from Lesbos and 66 from the nearby island of Chios, where riot police clashed with local residents hours earlier during a protest against the expulsions.
The EU and Turkey struck the deal last month. Under the agreement, Ankara agreed to take back all the asylum seekers and refugees — including the Syrians — who had used its territory to illegally reach Greece in return for a number of commitments from the EU.
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