Kara Tepe Refugee Camp

Greek police arrested seven people and were searching for another two on suspicion of planning or carrying out attacks on migrants on the island of Lesvos, authorities said Friday.

Police said five Greeks and two foreigners between the ages of 17 and 24 were arrested on Thursday night outside the Moria migrant camp, the largest camp for asylum-seekers in the Greek islands.

Migrants stranded on Lesvos protested against the dreadful conditions at the Moria reception center and the slow processing of asylum requests for a second day Tuesday as the government turned down a request for a state of emergency to be declared on the eastern Aegean island.

Asylum-seekers demonstrated on the Greek island of Lesvos for a second day to protest increasingly dire living conditions in and around the island's massively overcrowded migrant camp and delays in Greece's asylum application process.

Greek police fired teargas to disperse migrants and refugees protesting on Feb. 3 about conditions in migrant camps on the island of Lesbos and the slow pace of processing asylum requests.   

Violence broke out near the Kara Tepe camp, a police official said, after hundreds of people marched from the island's congested migrant camps to the city of Mytilene.

About 46,000 refugees and migrants arrived at the islands of the northern Aegean in 2019, according to figures released by the North Aegean's General Police Directorate on Thursday.

Greek authorities have transferred about 570 migrants from an overcrowded camp to the island of Lesbos, officials said. A regular ferry left Lesbos on Sunday night, transporting migrants living at Camp Moria, Kathimerini reports.

Authorities say it is part of a plan to reduce overcrowding at the camp, where about 13,000 people live in a space designed for 3,000.

Greek authorities were transferring around 570 migrants from an overcrowded camp on the island of Lesvos on Sunday, officials said.

A regularly scheduled ferry left Lesvos Sunday evening carrying the migrants, who used to live in the migrant camp of Moria.

Philippe Leclerc, the representative of the United Nations Refugee Agency in Greece, urged European Union member-states to accept asylum seekers from countries burdened by migration, following violent clashes on Wednesday between migrants at the Moria Reception and Identification Center on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos.

Greece began moving hundreds of asylum seekers on Monday from a camp on the island of Lesvos that holds around four times the number of people it was built for.

Over 11,000 refugees and migrants, most of whom have fled war or poverty in the Middle East, Asia or Africa, are holed up at Moria in Europe's biggest migrant camp.

Thirteen boats with 547 migrants arrived at the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos from the Turkish coast on Thursday afternoon, in what is the largest number of arrivals in one day since the migration crisis of 2015-2016, local media reported on Friday.