20,000 migrants arrested at sea in 2016

Nearly 20,000 migrants and refugees have been arrested at sea since the start of this year, the Turkish coastguard has revealed.

The Turkish coastguard, in cooperation with both the gendarmerie and the police, made the arrests during 416 raids. This comes in spite of EU measures to stem the flow of people seeking refuge in Europe.

Could you make it as a refugee?

Since January 2015, over 1 million people have arrived in Europe by sea and land
Take the journey from Syria to Europe and see if you’d survive

Coastguard personnel arrested 5,506 people in January and 8,747 in February while 5,000 have already been arrested so far this month.

Humanity washed ashore: Is Europe doing enough? Watch now

This is six times as many as were arrested in the same period last year. In 2014, 14,961 people were arrested at sea.

There has been 10x more refugees in the past 2 months of 2016 than the whole of 2015!Many have already lost their lives…

Posted by Middle East Monitor on Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.