Nearly 15,000 illegal immigrants who have been ordered to leave Norway by authorities are continuing to stay, according to a report by The Local. The whereabouts of the vast majority are unknown, causing problems for police and immigration services.
Legal notification to leave Norway has been served to nearly 15,000 illegal immigrants by the National Police Immigration Service Norway (Politiets Utlendingsenhet or PU), but they have stayed beyond the deadline. Five thousand of the foreigners are currently in Norwegian asylum reception facilities, but the whereabouts of the remainder are unknown.
“There are many [people] who we don’t know where they are at any time,” Cecilie Johansen, head of communications at PU, told a Norwegian news outlet. “Many of those [people] move around a lot.”
Several of the immigrants are known to be regular asylum seekers who have had their claims denied. A further 550 are known to be convicted criminals who ought to have been deported. A paper produced jointly by the PU, the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration and the Norwegian Directorate for Correctional Services has highlighted that having a number of people within Norway with false or unknown identities creates a security problem for the Norwegian authorities.
However the Norwegian Organisation for Asylum Seekers (NOAS) dismissed the idea that the illegal immigrants could be a security threat. Ann-Magrit Austenå, the secretary general of NOAS said “This is an exaggeration. Some of them may pose a security risk, seen from the viewpoint of the police and the security authorities. But claiming that this compound group in itself poses a security risk is not right.”
In July Breitbart London reported on a terror threat to Norway posed by a jihadist group who had been fighting in Syria. Norway’s security forces were put on high alert, with an increased police presence at border crossings, airports and train stations.
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