GETTY EU officials are seeking talks with Egypt over a new migrant route into Europe

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The Turkish coastguard has ramped up policing in the Aegean after the country’s leaders struck a controversial deal with Brussels in March. And now migrants looking to come into Europe from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries are turning to expensive sea voyages taking them from Egypt to Italy.

GETTY The sea voyage from Turkey to Greece has traditionally been the most popular migrant route

The European Union’s border agency Frontex claimed one of the reasons for 19,000 migrants arriving in Italy last month was “a growing number of departures from Egypt”. Worried EU fat cats are now calling for urgent talks with Cairo in a bid to stop the bloc’s out of control migrant crisis escalating even further.

The deputy director of the European Commission's migration and home affairs department, Olivier Onidi, told Brussels officials they need “to try to better understand why this is happening”. This favoured new route into Europe, which takes 10 days on a boat across the Mediterranean, is significantly more expensive than the journey between Turkey and Greece.

Migrant Crisis: Mass exodus from the migrant camp continues Tue, October 25, 2016 Hundreds of migrants are continuing to arrive in Europe as they flee the scenes of chaos and brutality of the Islamic State in the Middle East. Play slideshow 1 of 224

The head of the secretariat at the the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime has described the voyage as “the business class departure point”. Tuesday Reitano said: “Whereas people pay 1000-1,500 dollars to depart from Libya, you would pay 3-5,000 dollars to depart from Egypt and you would have a totally different class of voyage.

GETTY The EU struck a controversial deal with Turkey in March

“It's a very discreet, very effective, highly corrupt industry that's been going out of Egypt the whole time. “It's really well sewn up. It's very, very organised.”

GETTY Hansjoerg Haber quite last week after less than a year in the job