Turkey detained 1.2 million migrants who tried to cross illegally into Europe over the past five years, official figures cited by Turkish media showed Friday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th January, 2020) Turkey detained 1.2 million migrants who tried to cross illegally into Europe over the past five years, official figures cited by Turkish media showed Friday.
A record 454,662 undocumented migrants were held last year alone, almost a half of them Afghans, according to the migration management authority's data seen by the Anadolu news agency.
Syrians accounted for 55,000 of last year's arrests, while Pakistanis came second with 71,000 detentions. Some 60,000 people were stopped from going to Europe by sea.
The hike in illegal migration comes as armed conflicts continue in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Ankara signed a deal with Brussels in 2016 to stop hundreds of thousands of aspiring asylum seekers from reaching EU borders.
