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12th body recovered from Aegean after sinking

More than 600,000 people have arrived in Greece this year by making the short but perilous journey by boat or rubber dinghy from Turkey to outlying islands.

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The U.N. refugee agency said those rescued included a seven-year-old child whose parents were both missing.

State-run Anadolu Agency said the coastguard found the bodies of six children including a baby, adding that the migrants on the boat were Afghans.

The Turkish coast guard recovered the bodies of the six children.

The town’s beaches are regularly used by migrant boats heading for the island of Chios.

Greece’s efforts to repatriate migrants have been fraught with difficulty. Thousands more are trying to make the trip.

More than 886,000 migrants have arrived in Europe by sea so far this year, according to the latest United Nations figures.

Greece recently sought to return some 50 Pakistanis but Islamabad accepted only 20 of them, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said this week. Almost all have entered the country from Turkey, paying large fees to smuggling gangs who arrange their crossings in small, overcrowded boats.

Five children were among 11 migrants who drowned after a boat carrying dozens sank off the Greece’s eastern coast Wednesday, officials said. Migrants will need the “arrival ID” to claim asylum-seeker benefits and conduct asylum proceedings.

The bottleneck occurred after Macedonia blocked passage to those not fleeing war zones in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Greek harbor police said that perhaps ten others disappeared in the waves, which suggests that many more may have died than early numbers indicated.

Meanwhile police began to dismantle migrant tents which had been blocking a rail line for the past month, leading to losses for the rail operator and Greek exporters.

The influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants into Greece since August prompted an agreement last week under which the European Union will pay Turkey €3bn (£2.1bn) towards the cost of Syrian refugees while Turkey will try to reduce the numbers crossing into Greece. However later those detained were put on the buses to Athens along with other migrants.

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A stranded migrant sits on a sofa next to a make shift camp at the Greek Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni Greece