Over one quarter of 185,000 people who applied for asylum in the EU in the first quarter of the year are inhabitants of Kosovo, which makes them the most numerous category among asylum-seekers, states the report of EU statistical office Eurostat released on Thursday.
With almost 49,000 asylum requests, ethnic Albanians rank above citizens of Syria who have a 16 percent stake in the total number of asylum applications, followed by people from Afghanistan who occupy the third place on the list with 7 percent of all asylum requests.
The greatest number of asylum requests (40 percent) was filed to Germany and Hungary (18 percent), while all other EU members received a considerably fewer number of asylum requests, Eurostat said.
Compared to the first quarter of 2014, the total number of asylum seekers in 2015 increased by 85 percent, but the growth does not apply when viewed relative to the last three months of 2014, when EU countries received around 185,000 asylum seekers.
