by Our Foreign Desk

GREECE said yesterday that deportations under the European Union-Turkey agreement had been suspended after thousands of refugees in detention camps applied for asylum.

The first shipload of 202 deportees from Chios and Lesbos arrived in Turkey on Monday. Yesterday Turkey said it had sent 78 refugees to Europe by air.

Asylum Service director Maria Stavropoulou said that about 3,000 people held on Greece’s Aegean islands were seeking asylum, with the application process to formally start by the end of the week.

Under the deal, those arriving in Greece from Turkey on or after March 20 will be deported if they do not apply for asylum or their application is rejected or inadmissible.

In return, EU countries will accept an equal number of Syrian-only refugees from Turkey, theoretically circumventing the dangerous people-trafficking routes.

UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, reported that several of those deported from Chios on Monday had not been given the chance to register asylum claims because of the administrative chaos.

Only 30 of 400 migration officers from other EU countries have arrived in Greece so far, Ms Stavropoulou said, while extra local staff would take “several months” to train and integrate into the Asylum Service.

Asylum applications typically take about three months to process, Ms Stavropoulou said, but would be “considerably faster” for those held in detention.

“There will be a difficult few months ahead,” she said. “We are dealing with people who speak 70 different languages and many have travelled to Greece without papers because they are escaping war.”

In Denmark, police admitted that new laws ordering refugees to surrender money or possessions over 10,000 krone (£1,080) had not yet been used.

The law was intended to make supposedly wealthy refugees pay for their asylum in the Scandinavian country.