At least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, Europol. Many are feared to have fallen into the hands of organized trafficking syndicates.
In the first attempt by law enforcement agencies to quantify one of the most worrying aspects of the migrant crisis, Europol chief of staff Brian Donald said that thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities.
Donald said that 5,000 children had disappeared in Italy alone, while another 1,000 were unaccounted for in Sweden. He said that a sophisticated pan-European “criminal infrastructure” involving thousands was now targeting refugees.
Photo: AP
“It is not unreasonable to say that we are looking at 10,000-plus children. Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. The thing is that we do not have a handle on it; we just do not know where they are, what they are doing or whom they are with,” he said.
The plight of unaccompanied child refugees has emerged as one of the most pressing issues in the migrant crisis. Last week it was announced that Britain would accept more unaccompanied minors from Syria and other conflict zones.
According to Save the Children, an estimated 26,000 unaccompanied children entered Europe last year. Europol, which has a 900-strong force of intelligence analysts and police liaison officers, believes 27 percent of the 1 million arrivals in Europe last year were minors.
“Whether they are registered or not, we are talking about 270,000 children. Not all of those are unaccompanied, but we also have evidence that a large proportion might be,” said Donald, adding that the 10,000 figure is likely to be a conservative estimate of the actual number of unaccompanied minors who have disappeared since entering Europe.
In October last year, officials in Trelleborg, Sweden, revealed that about 1,000 unaccompanied refugee children, who had arrived in the port town over the previous month, had gone missing. On Tuesday last week, a separate report, again from Sweden, said that many unaccompanied refugees vanished and that there was “very little information about what happens after the disappearance.”
In the UK, the number of children who disappear soon after arriving as asylum seekers has doubled over the past year, raising fears that they are also being targeted by criminal gangs.
“Unaccompanied minors from regions of conflict are by far the most vulnerable population; those without parental care that have either been sent by their families to get into Europe first and then get the family over, or have fled with other family members,” said Mariyana Berket, of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Donald said Europol had received evidence that some unaccompanied child refugees in Europe have been sexually exploited. In Germany and Hungary — the former a popular destination nation for refugees and migrants, with the latter an important transit state — large numbers of criminals have been caught exploiting migrants, he said.
“An entire [criminal] infrastructure has developed over the past 18 months around exploiting the migrant flow. There are prisons in Germany and Hungary, where the vast majority of people arrested and placed there are in relation to criminal activity surrounding the migrant crisis,” Donald said.
The police agency has also documented a disturbing crossover between organized gangs helping to smuggle refugees into the EU and human-trafficking gangs exploiting them for sex work and slavery. He said that long-standing criminal gangs known to be involved in human trafficking, whose identity had been logged in the agency’s Phoenix database, were now being caught exploiting refugees.
“The ones who have been active in human smuggling are now appearing in our files in relation to migrant smuggling,” Donald said.
This week, Europol is to take evidence from organizations working on the refugee route through the Balkans, which requested a meeting with the law enforcement agency specifically to discuss children vanishing.
“Their concern is in relation to the number of unaccompanied minors. They are asking for help in identifying how these children are identified and then brought into the criminal infrastructure. They are dealing with this on a daily basis. They have come to us because they see it as a big problem,” Donald said.
He warned the public to be vigilant, adding that most child refugees who have gone missing would be hiding in plain sight.
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