10,000 refugee children are missing, says Europol
Source: The Guardian
Saturday 30 January 2016 20.15 GMT
At least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency. Many are feared to have fallen into the hands of organised trafficking syndicates.
In the first attempt by law enforcement agencies to quantify one of the most worrying aspects of the migrant crisis, Europol’s chief of staff told the Observer that thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities.
Brian Donald said 5,000 children had disappeared in Italy alone, while another 1,000 were unaccounted for in Sweden. He warned that a sophisticated pan-European “criminal infrastructure” was now targeting refugees. “It’s not unreasonable to say that we’re looking at 10,000-plus children. Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with.”
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“Whether they are registered or not, we’re talking about 270,000 children. Not all of those are unaccompanied, but we also have evidence that a large proportion might be,” said Donald, indicating 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.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/30/fears-for-missing-child-refugees
= new reply since forum marked as read
Not advocating anything but...millions of people would very likely be in a much better place today if Assad had slipped and fallen off a steep cliff about 5 years ago.
a heart wrenching situation. the trafficking of children must no longer be tolerated. it is too easy with everything going on in people's lives whereby so many feel powerless to overlook this travesty. we cannot condone this criminality.
do their parents know what peril their children are headed for? 
