1,500 asylum-seekers being transported to Greek mainland

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) - About 1,500 asylum-seekers were being transported from Greece's eastern Aegean island of Lesbos to the mainland Monday as part of government efforts to tackle massive overcrowding in refugee camps and a recent spike in the number of people arriving from the nearby Turkish coast.

A ship carrying 635 people set sail from Lesbos Monday morning for the northern port city of Thessaloniki. From there, authorities said, the asylum-seekers would be transported to a camp in Nea Kavala in northern Greece. A second ship carrying around 900 people was to leave Lesbos for Thessaloniki on Monday afternoon.

The transfer was part of decisions made during a national security meeting Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis convened Saturday, after nearly 600 people arrived on Lesbos in more than a dozen boats in the space of an hour Thursday.

The national security council meeting also decided to speed up the deportation of those whose asylum applications have been rejected, and to abolish the second-stage review of asylum applications. The government also announced increased border surveillance, to activate a maritime surveillance system and to bolster the coast guard's fleet with 10 new speedboats.

Hundreds of people continue to head to Greece from Turkey each week, despite a 2016 European Union-Turkey deal that restricts new arrivals to the islands pending deportation unless they are successful in their asylum application.

The EU-Turkey deal and the backlog of asylum cases has led to a large bottleneck on the eastern Aegean islands, where asylum-seekers are housed in massively overcrowded camps whose conditions aid groups frequently criticize. In general only those deemed to be in vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, very young and people with serious health problems are eligible for rehousing on the mainland.

Official figures released Friday showed that more than 10,000 people were being held in Lesbos in a facility with a capacity of 3,000, while there was also severe overcrowding on the islands of Chios, Leros, Kos and Samos.