Alwaght- Around 6,000 refugee children from Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia went missing in Germany in 2015.
5,835 refugee minors had disappeared in Germany over the past year, 555 of them under the age of 14, a new report carried out by the Funke Mediengruppe news organization stated on Monday.
According to German Parliament response to Funke Mediengruppe inquiry on missing refugee kids, only 2,171 of the 8,006 initially reported missing refugee kids ever turned up again.
Most of the vanished minors came from Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, Morocco and Algeria, German Interior Ministry told the newspaper but did not give an explanation for the cause of the alarming numbers.
Many refugee minors make the arduous journey to Germany without any adult supervision. Back in early February, the Ministry of Family Affairs, responding to media reports about the status of refugee minors in the country, said there was no reason to believe thousands of minors and children had gone missing.
The Interior Ministry, which had responded to Funke Mediengruppe's request, didn't provide an explanation for the disappearances.
Green politician Luise Amtsberg took the opportunity to criticize the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. According to Amtsberg, the federal government is not responding to the problem in a satisfactory way, having not seriously considered "the dangers of forced prostitution and exploitation," AFP news agency reported.
“It is sad that 5,835 unaccompanied teens and children went missing last year and the government has not been on alert,” Amtsberg told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) on Monday.