German Migration Office Head Fired Over Bribery Scandal - Reports

BERLIN (Sputnik) - German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer fired head of the country's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) Jutta Cordt and her deputy Ralph Tiesler following the asylum bribery scandal, local media reported Friday, citing the Interior Ministry.

Seehofer informed the BAMF leadership on Wednesday that he was relieving them of their duties, according to the Spiegel Online newspaper.

The corruption scandal erupted in April after several employees at the BAMF's Bremen office were accused of taking bribes in exchange for granting around 1,200 refugees, who did not meet acceptance criteria, with asylum.

The BAMF regional office director with the help of several accomplices allegedly accepted a more than a thousand of migrants mainly from from the Yezidi Kurdish religious community in Iraq between 2013 and 2017 without valid legal reasons.

On May 31, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's parliamentary faction demanded that a special committee to investigate the government's migration policy be established. Similar request was made by the German Free Democratic Party's (FDP) parliamentary faction on June 4, which asked the Bundestag to create a committee dedicated to finding those responsible for the asylum management scandal.