International

More than three times as many migrants were tracked entering the European Union by irregular means in July compared to the same month last year, official data shows.

EU border agency Frontex said a record 107,500 migrants reached the EU's borders last month, as the 28-member bloc struggles to cope with a refugee crisis.

"The figure was the third consecutive monthly record, jumping well past the previous high of more than 70,000 reached in June," the Warsaw-based agency said in a statement.

The July figure comes days after EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said the world faced its "worst refugee crisis since World War II".

While the increase recorded by Frontex may be partly due to better monitoring, it highlighted the scale of a crisis that has led to more than 2,000 deaths this year as desperate migrants take to rickety boats.

The EU has approved 2.4 billion euros ($6.7 billion) of funding to help member states cope with the flood of migrants — many of them Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans fleeing instability at home.

The number of migrants reaching the borders was nearly 340,000 during the first seven months of the year, up from 123,500 during the same period in 2014, according to Frontex.

That was a 175 per cent rise on the same period last year and much more than the 280,000 registered arrivals in all of 2014.

"This has created an unprecedented pressure on border control authorities in Greece, Italy and Hungary," the agency said.

The July record figure includes 50,000 migrants detected in the Aegean Sea, more than 20,000 in Italy, and nearly 35,000 in the Western Balkans.

"This is an emergency situation for Europe that requires all EU member states to step in to support the national authorities who are taking on a massive number of migrants at its borders," Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri added in the statement.

"Frontex has called on member states to provide additional equipment and people to support our operations in Greece and in Hungary."

Eight suspected traffickers arrested

Meanwhile, Italian police said they had arrested eight suspected human traffickers they said had reportedly forced migrants to stay in the hold of a fishing boat in the Mediterranean as 49 of them suffocated on engine fumes.

Some of those traffickers were accused of kicking the heads of the migrants when they tried to climb out of the hold as the air became unbreathable, prosecutor Michelangelo Patane said.

The dead migrants were discovered last weekend, packed into a fishing boat also carrying 312 others trying to cross the Mediterranean to Italy from North Africa.

It was the third mass fatality in the Mediterranean this month. Last week, up to 50 migrants were unaccounted for when their rubber dinghy sank, a few days after some 200 were presumed dead when their boat capsized off Libya.

Greece appealed to its EU partners to come up with a comprehensive strategy to deal with what new data showed were 21,000 refugees landing on Greek shores last week alone.

A spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in Geneva said the EU should help Greece but that Athens, which is struggling with a debt crisis, also needed to show "much more leadership" on the issue.

Greek officials said they needed better coordination within the EU.

"This problem cannot be solved by imposing stringent legal processes in Greece, and, certainly, not by overturning the boats," government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili said.