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Group of 20 refugees arrives in Spain

Xinhua, May 24, 2016 Adjust font size:

A group of 20 refugees from Syria and Iraq arrived in Spain from Greece on Tuesday as part of the European resettlement program of migrants.

The group was made up of seven men, five women and eight children from three different families. They arrived here at midday after leaving Athens on an regularly scheduled Aegean Airways flight, accompanied by members of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Ten refugees are to be housed in the Catalan region of Spain, nine will be housed in the central region of Aragon, and one in Andalusia in the south of Spain, Spanish national TV network RTVE reported.

This is the first group of 150 refugees that the Spanish government has promised to house before the end of June, with a second group of 44 scheduled to arrive in Spain on May 30.

Last September, Spain agreed to take in 15,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq as part of the agreement reached by the European Union. However, until Tuesday, only 18 refugees had been welcomed into the country. None of them arrived in 2016.

This provoked criticism of the Spanish government by the local branch of UN refugee agency UNHCR, whose representative said Spain had to "assume greater responsibility and willingness," while the government responded that carrying out the necessary paperwork was causing the delay. Endit