A majority of EU interior ministers, meeting in Brussels on Monday, agreed in principle to share out 120,000 asylum seekers on top of some 40,000 distributed on a voluntary basis so far. But details of the deal, to be formalised on October 8, were vague with several ex-Communist central European states still rejecting mandatory quotas.
An estimated 464,876 migrants have now crossed the Mediterranean so far this year, up from 432,000 as of Friday, which already doubled the total for all of 2014, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
Some 72 migrants are believed to have died in past few days trying to cross the seas from Turkey to Greek islands, the IOM said.
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