German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has expressed confidence that the country will soon find ways to deport immigrants convicted of serious crimes or deemed Islamist threats to Afghanistan and Syria.
"We are in concrete negotiations on this and are confident that we will be able to achieve this for this group," Faeser said on Thursday at a meeting with the state interior ministers from Germany's 16 federal states just outside Berlin.
There are only a small number of such people, Faeser stressed. She said the German government is examining the extent to which repatriation via neighbouring countries would be possible in the case of Afghan nationals, citing Uzbekistan as a country that had been previously discussed.
However, Faeser did not want to publicly name any countries with which talks are ongoing out of fears of "jeopardizing the concrete negotiations we are currently conducting."
Germany halted deportations to Afghanistan after the Taliban, a radical Islamist group, seized power over the country in August 2021.
But resuming deportations to Afghanistan and war-torn Syria has been a hot-button issue in Germany, particularly in the wake of the slaying of a policeman by a knife-wielding Afghan migrant during an attack in the German city of Mannheim in May.
