Poland’s new government announced on Saturday that it will not allow any refugee to enter the nation under the European Union’s distribution program after the series of Paris attacks on Friday.
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Mouzalas told a news conference the man had arrived alongside 198 refugees on a boat from Turkey.
When he entered Greece, the man was using the Syrian passport, with the holder later registered as crossing the border between Macedonia and Serbia where he formally applied for asylum, Serbian officials said. The White House earlier this year announced plans to accept an additional 10,000 refugees from Syria, and administration officials said that would continue despite the events in Paris.
But the idea that Syrian refugees are more unsafe than European citizens, many of whom have traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight, is not only misguided, it is exactly what the Islamic State wants people in Western countries to believe, Adam Taylor writes in The Washington Post. “There was no Interpol warrant issued against this person”. Then on 8 October, he registered in Opatovac (Croatia). “According to the latest information available, that is no more than conjecture and speculation”, he said. Any identity documents and fingerprint records would have to be matched with the remains of the attackers to establish whether they passed through various countries posing as refugees, or perhaps bought or stole passports along the way. Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck said however the assertion that the suspect attacker had passed through Austria had “no concrete basis”.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly said that closing borders is not the answer to Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War II and encouraged governments to take in more refugees. “And trying to build fences and stopping them at sea only drives them deeper into the hands of criminal gangs, and drives them underground where there is no control over who comes and goes”.
