Syrian migrant children play in front of a building acting as a temporary refugee camp in Gabcikovo, Slovakia, October 8, 2015. Germany is seen as the keenest supporter of the plan; leaders of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Sweden, Finland and Greece also attended, while France may also join the group.
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The suspects included mainly Syrians and Greeks. None of their identities have been released.
The suspects are believed to have set up headquarters in Greece, where migrants – either in Turkey or on their way to Greece – would contact them for assistance with their journeys to northern Europe. The gang did everything from arranging transport to supplying forged travel documents.
Refugees may be flown directly from Turkey, and also from Lebanon and Jordan which host millions of refugees too, to European Union countries that volunteer to adhere to the plan.
Back in September, EU interior ministers approved the principle of sharing 160,000 refugees between member states over the next two years despite opposition by Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia to mandatory quotas.
Almost all of those entering Greece on a boat from Turkey are from the war zones of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Frustration has risen in recent weeks in the European Commission, the EU executive charged with ramping up controls on the external borders, and among EU governments that Greece is failing to make use of available EU funds and personnel to ensure people arriving in the Schengen area are documented.
Small groups of people from countries such as Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been blockading the crossing since Wednesday. He says accusations by unidentified European officials in the FT story were a mixture of “reality and myth”. As we’ve repeatedly stated and as Europe has belatedly understood, Greece is the start of the corridor. “If you want to screen migrants and refugees, you need more time than only one minute to fingerprint”, Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, said in an interview with Britain’s Guardian and five other European newspapers.
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Orban said he expected intense pressure from Europe to accept some of these refugees, something he said Budapest could not do.
