Europol, the EU law enforcement agency, has evidence that at least 10,000 children arrived in Europe in search for asylum and disappeared. Many of them could have fallen into the hands of organised trafficking syndicates.

Europol’s chief of staff told Brian Donald the Observer that thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities. Brian Donald said 5,000 children had disappeared in Italy alone, while another 1,000 were unaccounted for in Sweden.

He warned that a pan-European “criminal infrastructure” was now targeting refugees. “It’s not unreasonable to say that we’re looking at 10,000-plus children. Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with.”

There is evidence that pan-European gangs are kidnapping refugee children for sex work and slavery. Such gangs are involved in human trafficking and exploiting migrants from Africa and the Middle East, Mr Donald told the Observer.

Europol estimates 270,000 child refugees arrived in Europe last year, more than a quarter of the 1.1 million refugees who arrived in total. According to Save the Children, 26,000 of these children were unaccompanied by adults. For the reference, the vast majority of migrants are arriving in Europe by sea.