A total of 261 immigrants who filed an asylum application after landing in Malta were found staying illegally in other EU member states last year.

The immigrants will be repatriated to Malta to continue with their application process in their first EU country of entry in line with EU rules, The Sunday Times has learnt.

According to Eurodac sources, the organisation responsible for the EU-wide biometric tool which helps determine the member states responsible for examining asylum claims, the majority of asylum seekers ‘escaping’ from Malta are heading towards greener pastures in Northern European countries.

According to the 2009 data, the majority of those apprehended – 102 – were found in the Netherlands, followed by Norway (74), not an EU member state but which takes part in the system, Germany (50) and Italy (10). Other originally ‘Maltese immigrants’ were apprehended in France, the Czech Republic, Finland and Sweden.

“We know Malta is not the final destination for all the illegal immigrants landing on the island and many do so by chance while crossing from North Africa to Italy’s southern borders,” a Eurodac official said.

“The trend of ‘Maltese im-migrants’ escaping to Northern Europe is similar to the situation in Greece and Italy. Illegal immigrants perceive the north of Europe as offering more opportunities and thus try to settle there, even illegally.”

The ‘Maltese’ asylum seekers were caught living illegally in other countries through their finger-prints, which are registered in an EU-wide system as soon as they file an asylum application.

Therefore, the fingerprints of an asylum seeker caught residing illegally in an EU member state are checked through the EU database and, if found to have registered a claim in another member state, they will be sent back. However, the EU system still keeps some asylum seekers out of the loop as a number of fingerprints sent by certain member states are illegible and not kept in the system.

Malta has been identified by Eurodac as one of those member states which in 2009 sent a high percentage of erroneous data, prompting Brussels to urge the local authorities to improve the situation by giving the necessary training to the personnel, particularly police officers, handling this data.

More than 10 per cent of the fingerprints sent by Malta to the Eurodac facility last year were rejected mainly due to “the low quality of the fingerprint images submitted and human error or the wrong configuration in Malta’s equipment,” according to Eurodac.

The number of errors being committed by Malta in sending this data is much higher than the EU average. Other member states with high rates of errors included the UK, France and Germany.

On a general note, the EU said that in 2009, Eurodac processed 236,936 sets of fingerprints of asylum seekers, 31,071 sets of fingerprints of people crossing the borders irregularly and 85,554 sets of those apprehended while illegally staying on the territory of an EU member state.

Figures show that in 2009, the number of registered asylum applications rose by eight per cent, which means that the increasing trend of the previous two years continued.

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