About 78,000 People Apply for German Asylum in First 5 Months of 2018 - Reports

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Germany has received nearly 78,000 asylum applications over the first five months of this year, local media reported on Saturday, citing the Interior Ministry's statistics.

According to the Passauer Neue Presse, a total of 18, 300 asylum applications have been registered since January in the European Dactyloscopy (EURODAC) database. The number of applications that have been submitted during the same period last year amounted to 90,400, the newspaper added.

The so-called open-door policy, initiated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has prompted criticism from a number of political parties and movements that oppose migration. In October 2017, Merkel and Horst Seehofer, the respective leaders of the allied Christian Democratic Union of Germany and Christian Social Union in Bavaria, announced an agreement to reduce the inflow of migrants to 200,000 people a year.

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On Friday, local media reported that Seehofer fired the head of the country's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) Jutta Cordt and her deputy Ralph Tiesler following the asylum bribery scandal. The row 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.

On May 31, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's parliamentary faction demanded a special committee to investigate the government's migration policy be established. A 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.

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