Almost 900 Syrian migrants have been arrested in the United Kingdom over the past year for crimes including rape and child abuse.
The Express reported that migrants from Syria are able to make asylum claims after already arriving on British soil, and “87 per cent of initial asylum decisions in Syrian cases gave permission to remain in the UK” according to a Parliamentary research paper.
Another UK newspaper, The Sun, obtained records saying that 897 Syrian migrants had been arrested in 2015. Reasons for arrest included charges for rape, death threats, and violent assaults. 238 of those arrests were in London alone.
One of the most shocking cases is that of the sexual assault of a young girl by a gang of seven men, at least one of whom was Syrian. The police involved were “blasted for not publicizing the case and the BBC were accused of sitting on the story for weeks,” The Sun reported. One of the accused men was previously featured in a BBC piece about Syrian migrants finding new homes in Britain.
The British government is planning on helping 20,000 Syrian people resettle into the UK in the wake of widespread violence and civil unrest in Syria.