804,465 people have entered Greece from start of 2015 - Coast Guard
The Greek Coast Guard said on Thursday that a whopping 804,465 people have entered Greece from the beginning of the year until Dec. 21, showing the massive scale of the challenge facing the country.
Of those people, about half (457,149) were refugees from Syria, while the rest 347,316 were economic migrants of 77 different nationalities, mainly Arabic and African countries. Regarding migrant traffickers the data show the majority are Turkish nationals and 12 were Greeks.
Frontex announced recently it will launch Poseidon Rapid Intervention on 28 December, replacing the ongoing Joint Operation Poseidon Sea with a larger number of officers and technical equipment.
The deployment will gradually rise to some 376 officers and interpreters on the ground. They will include experts in screening, debriefing, fingerprinting and forged documents from various EU Member States and Schengen Associated Countries.
