[Ynet] Australia rejected 500 Syrian refugees on security grounds during more than a year of vetting while accepting 12,000 eligible for resettlement from Middle Eastern camps, an official said Thursday.
Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton said the deadly rampage near Britannia's Parliament on Wednesday, in which a man used a knife and car as weapons to kill four people, showed Australia was right to be cautious on who it accepted.
"The tragic events in London and elsewhere demonstrate the government's approach was prudent and there are people that we'd excluded on national security grounds and people that we do have concerns about that we have not brought to our country and we never will," Dutton told news hounds.
| Update from the Daily Mail at 9:30 a.m. EDT, which has the ugly details: |
More than 500 Iraqi and Syrian refugees barred from entering Australia after they were found on a security watchlist - with some also being monitored for terror by ASIO
- Names of 500 refugees appeared on an international security watchlist
- The list found risks amongst priority family groups rather than individual males
- 17,000 biometric scans were done on potential refugees since October 2015
- 30 refugees were red-flagged as having adverse national security profiles
| And another, more comforting article on the subject added at 1:20 p.m. EDT, also from the Daily Mail, which is on a roll: |
Christians not Muslims make up most of Australia's 12,000 new refugees from Syria - to stop Islamic extremists slipping in to the country
Christian refugees fleeing Syria were prioritised over Muslims by the Turnbull Government to help weed out extremists after Australia pledged to re-settle 12,000 from the war-torn nation. |