Sweden Sees Record Number of Over 10,500 Weekly Asylum Claims

A record of 10,553 people applied for an asylum in Sweden last week, the country's migration agency Migrationsverket said in a statement on Monday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The majority of asylum seekers came from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq with 4,736, 2,536 and 1,456 applications respectively, according to the statement. Some 2,900 refugees were children not accompanied by a parent or legal guardian.

On November 5, Swedish Minister for Migration and Asylum Policy Morgan Johansson said that the number of asylum seekers was increasing faster than the number of accommodation places, meaning that there were no guarantees any more that the authorities would be able to accommodate everyone.

Earlier in October, Migrationsverket reported that Sweden expected up to 190,000 asylum seekers to arrive in the country in 2015.

The European Union is currently struggling to manage a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa for Europe.

Over 1.2 million illegal border crossings have been made into the European Union since the beginning of 2015, according to the EU border agency Frontex.