Greece asks EU partners for help to make migrant deal work

For months the epicenter of Europe's biggest migrant crisis since World War Two, Greece is struggling to effect the logistics operation needed to process asylum applications from hundreds of migrants still arriving daily along its shoreline.

Turkish officials arrived on the island of Lesbos on March 21 to help put the deal into practice. Anyone who arrived after March 20 must be held until their papers are processed and those deemed ineligible are to be sent back to Turkey from April 4.

Late on March 21, a first group of 150 migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were transferred - handcuffed and under police escort - from the island's registration center to a passenger ferry that would take them to the mainland by early morning.

They had arrived on Lesbos on March 20 and would be taken to immigration offices in Athens, a police spokesman said.

Under the EU-Turkey roadmap agreed last weekend, a plan must be made by March 25 and some 4,000 personnel - more than half from other European Union member states - deployed to the islands by next week.

"We must move very swiftly and in a coordinated manner over the next few days to get the best possible result," Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said after meeting EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in Athens.

"Assistance in human resources must come quickly."

Avramopoulos said France, Germany and the Netherlands had already pledged logistics and personnel.

However, on March 21, the day after the formal start of an agreement intended to close off the main route through which a million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe last year, authorities said 1,662 people had arrived on Greek islands by 7 a.m. (0500 GMT), twice the official count of the day before.