Mediterranean migrants: 26 minors rescued by Ocean Viking 'go missing' in southern France
More than two dozen unaccompanied underage migrants rescued by the humanitarian ship Ocean Viking and taken in by France have gone missing from their reception centre, local authorities have said.
The council in the southern Var department said the public prosecutor had been told that 26 of 44 young people under full legal age at the centre had run away.
"Three of the 44 minors had already run away... after being taken into care", the department's president Jean-Louis Masson told Le Figaro newspaper. On Thursday morning there were 23 more minors missing", he added.
"This was foreseeable for us," Christophe Paquette, deputy director general in charge of solidarity at the Var departmental council, told AFP.
He explained that most of the 26 minors were Eritreans who "never stay" because "they have specific objectives in northern European countries" such as the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland or Germany, where they want to join their families or relatives.
The young migrants had not been held in a closed waiting zone, unlike the 190 adults who also docked in the southern French port of Toulon a week ago after two weeks stranded in the Mediterranean aboard the Ocean Viking, the rescue ship chartered by the European humanitarian organisation SOS Méditerranée.
"Our mission is to protect them and not to detain them," Christophe Paquette added, stressing that the department had "reported their departure" after "trying to dissuade them".
The minors who ran away "behaved in an exemplary manner, they left thanking us", he insisted.
"The phenomenon of unaccompanied minors running away is frequent, for many reasons, family ties in another European country for instance," Toulon public prosecutor Samuel Finielz told reporters.
"Providing
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