German interior minister accused of manipulating refugee statistics

By Oliver Towfigh Nia

BERLIN (AA) - German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is facing serious allegations that the numbers of refugees arriving in Germany since the start of the year have been manipulated, local media reports said Saturday.

While Faeser claims only 57,647 refugees have entered German territory, the federal police have registered 101,900 foreigners since January.

The data of the federal police covers merely four different regions of Germany - Berlin, Munich, Pirna, and Stuttgart.

The minister's statistics on the number of refugees coming to Germany since January is therefore more than 40% lower than that reported by the country’s federal police.

In fact, the actual numbers are thought to be significantly higher as a result of a lack of data from other regions of Germany.

Federal police union boss Heiko Teggatz told Germany's top-selling Bild newspaper that the much higher figures from the federal police "reflected exactly what my colleagues have been telling me for months."

Meanwhile, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) has counted 154,557 people who have applied for asylum since the beginning of the year. That is even 2.7 times more than the Ministry of the Interior reports in its internal Migration Analysis Report.

Faeser was recently criticized for not providing the Federal Police with the Migration Analysis Report for October. The numbers only go through September. It is speculated that they have jumped again in the past month.

Last month, Faeser had expressed concern about the increased number of migrants entering Germany via the so-called Balkan route.

She said it worried her, because the asylum seekers would have to be accommodated in Germany in addition to the approximately one million war refugees from Ukraine.