Bogus refugee case angers Germans

BERLIN - The bizarre case of a German soldier who registered as a Syrian refugee has exposed failings in Germany's handling of a mass influx of over a million asylum seekers while angering the public

Posing as a Damascus fruit seller, army lieutenant Franco Albrecht, 28, managed to gain asylum in his home country, obtaining a space in a shelter and monthly benefits of $447 - even though he speaks no Arabic.

Investigators said Albrecht harbored far-right, anti-immigrant views and was plotting an attack that he planned to blame on refugees.

The case, which came to light last week, has sparked anger in Germany, where skepticism was already running high over the authorities' ability to competently handle the record influx of refugees.

It adds fuel to criticism of the asylum bureaucracy raised by activists and legal experts over recent months.

Critics have warned that many officials and interpreters are underqualified, and that chaos engulfing the administration could harm vulnerable victims fleeing the horrors of war.

Take the case of Mohamed Homad, a Syrian refugee from Aleppo, who received two conflicting decisions on his asylum application in October.

In the first letter, he was accorded refugee status which grants him residence for three years as well as the right to bring his immediate family members to Germany.

In the second letter, which arrived just a few days later, he was only given subsidiary protection - which rules out family reunion, Homad said.

To his dismay, his lawyer explained to him that authorities claimed that the first letter was just a draft and not valid.

With tens of thousands of refugees arriving in Germany every week in the summer of 2015, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) suddenly found itself buried in an avalanche of new files.

Within a few months, BAMF, which is tasked with interviewing asylum applicants and deciding on their requests, had to recruit many more staff, more than doubling its employees from 3,000 to 7,300.