Paramedics and volunteers carry a Syrian woman who has recently given birth on a beach after she arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegeans sea from Turkey on Oct 13. (AFP)

BRUSSELS, Oct 13, (Agencies): Some 170,000 irregular migrants entered the European Union in September, the bloc’s border agency Frontex said on Tuesday, taking the total for the year so far to 710,000. That compares with 282,000 migrants crossing irregularly for the whole of 2014 as Europe faces its biggest refugee crisis since World War Two.

Some of the increase may reflect double-counting, notably due to a surge in people arriving in Greece but then crossing the Balkans and re-entering the EU in Hungary. In August, Frontex said in its latest statement, it recorded 190,000 irregular arrivals, many of them by sea to Greece, setting a fifth consecutive monthly record. It had earlier reported 156,000 irregular border crossings in August.

The rapidly collated figures on those people detected provide a rough monthly snapshot of migration flows. Statistics on asylum claims in the EU, which lag behind, showed some 400,000 people claimed protection at the bloc’s borders in the first half of this year, compared with 625,000 in all of 2014. In all, 350,000 people reached Greece from January to September, Frontex said, of whom 49,000 arrived in September alone, many of them Syrians.

A shortage of boats in Libya and worsening weather helped to halve the number of migrants arriving in Italy in September to 12,000, Frontex said, bringing the total for the first nine months in Italy to 129,000, many of them from Eritrea. The total number of irregular border crossings include significant double counting. In the nine months to September, Hungary reported 204,000 people crossing its borders who did not have the appropriate passports and visas.

That was a 13-fold increase on the same period in 2014. But, a Frontex spokeswoman said, some entering Hungary would already have been recorded as entering Greece before moving on across non-EU Balkan states.

VIENNA: A human trafficker who crammed 42 migrants into just six square metres (65 square feet) in the back of a lorry was sentenced to three years in jail in Austria on Tuesday.

“It’s not difficult to imagine what it was like with 42 people squashed into six square meters,” presiding judge Xenia Krapfenbauer said, calling it an “atrocious case of trafficking”. The Romanian defendant, 37, said that he did not know how many people were inside and that he had been paid 1,500 euros ($1,705) to drive the lorry. By the time Austrian police stopped the vehicle in July near Vienna, the migrants had been locked up for seven hours nonstop, with temperatures outside more than 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit).