German authorities do not know the whereabouts of 130,000 migrants, the government confessed today. It means that more than one in ten unvetted new arrivals from the Middle East have disappeared, somewhere in Europe. Of the 1.1 million migrants who registered as asylum seekers in Germany in 2015, “about 13 per cent did not turn up at the reception centres to which they had been directed,” the government said in a written reply to a question from a lawmaker from the Left Party.

The official government admission follows a previous calculation suggesting that the number of missing migrants could be as high as 600,000. The Interior Ministry said that the migrants, who were initially invited into Europe by German Chancellor Merkel, may have travelled on to other countries or “slipped into illegality”. READ MORE