Nearly 6,000 refugee children who went missing in Germany last year have yet to be found.
German papers obtained the numbers from the Interior Ministry to the German Parliament and published the report Monday, revealing 5,835 of the refugee children reported missing in 2015 are still lost. The vast majority of them are teens 14 or older.
In all, just over 8,000 refugee children were reported missing last year, and 2,171 of them were found according to the report. But 5,835 other children remain missing.
“The missing, unaccompanied, underage refugee children came mainly from Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, Morocco and Algeria,” the Interior Ministry said in the report. It’s unclear why the children are missing or what if anything happened to them, although a big concern is that they have become human trafficking victims.
Federal German police officials told the paper the numbers are prone to distortion if one child is reported missing in different places or if the child’s name is slightly different in multiple reports.
“This does not mean that something happened to all of them,” a Europol spokesperson told reporters recently after the organization reported 10,000 refugee children had gone missing in Europe last year. “A portion of the children could in fact be staying with relatives. But it does mean that these children are potentially at risk.”
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