Landsbergis: Turkey could help identify migrants

“As far as we know, a significant share of those individuals arrive through Turkish airports using flights from Turkey. We believe that Turkey has information about the identity of those people. Identification of people is one of the bigger challenges faced by the Lithuanian government today,” Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told reporters on Wednesday. “We could identify those people quickly in cooperation with Turkey and would then be able to demand that they are accepted in the countries they have departed from,” he added. According to the minister, this issue had recently been discussed with the Turkish foreign minister and arrangements for a visit to Ankara in the near future were underway.

Landsbergis also said that he had had a similar discussion with his counterpart from Iraq, the source country of the majority of migrants, several weeks ago. “We asked to provide a possibility to transfer a consular employee to Lithuania either from the embassy in Warsaw or from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad. Lithuania could cover such personnel costs as it wants to be able to identify those crossing into the Lithuanian territory as quickly as possible,” the minister said. More than 1,400 illegal migrants, most of them without documents, have been detained at Lithuania’s border with Belarus so far this year, with the majority of them coming from the Middle East and African countries. Lithuania declared a state-level emergency on Friday due to the recent surge in illegal migration. Lithuanian officials say it is a campaign organized by the Belarusian regime against Lithuania.

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