(MENAFN- Gulf Times) Germany has lost track of 30,000 rejected asylum-seekers, Bild daily reported yesterday, piling pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to agree a migrant policy with potential coalition partners that ensures no repeat of a migration crisis in 2015.
The paper said the migrants were on a December 2016 list of people due to leave the country and quoted an interior ministry spokesman as saying they could not rule out that some 'had already left or disappeared without the relevant authorities knowing.
One commentator at Bild, which has run a campaign to speed up deportations of failed asylum-seekers, wrote: 'No wonder many people are worried and unsettled.
'They ask: ‘can the state protect me?' Politicians must take this insecurity seriously.
The report, which coincided with official data showing the number of people seeking refuge in Germany more than doubled in the two years until the end of 2016 to 1.6mn, comes as migrant policy tops the agenda in coalition talks.
Voters punished Merkel for her open-door policy in a September election, with her conservatives suffering heavy losses to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Her conservative bloc has tried to paper over internal divisions on migrant policy but is still at odds with the Free Democrats (FDP) and especially the Greens with whom they want to rule.
Plans to discuss the issue yesterday were delayed.
The Statistics Office said the 1.6mn people seeking refuge by the end of last year was a 113% jump from 2014 and equivalent to 16% of Germany's foreign population.
Included in the figures are people from abroad staying in Germany for humanitarian reasons, people still going through the asylum process, those granted refugee status or subsidiary protection status and failed asylum-seekers who stay.
More than half of the 1.6mn people had by the end of 2016 been granted permission to stay in Germany while some 158,000 were rejected asylum-seekers, said the Office.
Some 455,000 of the total were from Syria.
Although the number of new arrivals to Germany has fallen sharply in the last 18 months and the government has stepped up deportations of rejected asylum-seekers, many Germans, worried about security, say better controls are needed.
'We need to know who is in our country and who has left, said conservative Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, known for taking a tough line on migrants.
Last year, a failed asylum-seeker from Tunisia killed 12 people when he drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas Market.
On Tuesday, a 19-year old Syrian man was detained on suspicion of planning a bomb attack in Germany.
The AfD, continuing to put pressure on politicians on the migrant issue, criticised the southern state of Baden Wuerttemberg for accepting 34,000 Syrian refugees.
'Although the war in Syria is as good as over, the regional government does not mind the asylum authorities continuing to let Syrians stay here, said the regional AfD in a statement.
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