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CANADA refused an immigration request from the Syrian family whose two small boys and mother tragically drowned on Wednesday, an MP has revealed.
New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Fin Donnelly submitted a request on behalf on the boys’ aunt, Teema Kurdi, only to see it turned down by immigration officials.
The boys’ father Abdullah Kurdi described how the people-trafficker in charge of their overloaded rubber boat had panicked in the rough waters of the Aegean Sea and jumped overboard.
“I took over and started steering. The waves were so high and the boat flipped. I took my wife and my kids in my arms and I realised they were all dead,” he said.
“All I want is to be with my children at the moment.”
The heartbreaking photo of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a beach in Turkey after he died along with his elder brother Galip and mother Rehan, has encapsulated the horror of the Mediterranean refugee crisis.
A report by the UN Human Rights Council said yesterday that more than 2,000 Syrian refugees had drowned while trying to reach Europe since the start of the civil war in their country in 2011.
In Hungary, police allowed refugees to board trains at Budapest’s Keleti station following a two-day stand-off, only to take them to a refugee camp in Bicske, 22 miles west of the capital.
Desperate and angry people who had been trying to reach the relatively welcoming destinations of Austria or Germany resisted as riot police forced them off.
Amid the scenes reminiscent of the second world war, one woman clutching her small child lay on the tracks in protest until she was forcibly removed.
Hungary’s bitterly anti-immigration Prime Minister Viktor Orban blamed Germany for the crisis, claiming: “We Hungarians are full of fear.”
In the Czech Republic, police said that they had ended the practice of writing identification numbers on refugees’ arms, which critics had said harked back to the nazi Holocaust.
The Greek coastguard reported yesterday morning that it had rescued 751 people in 19 separate incidents in the previous 24 hours, down on more than 1,000 the previous day.
