LONDON -- French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy will hold talks with his British counterpart David Blunkett here Monday to try to resolve the problem of the asylum seekers at Sangatte centre in northern France, the source of disagreement between the two countries for three years.

Sarkozy, who arrived here late Sunday, will also meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the day, a spokesman for the British Home Office told AFP.

With the Red Cross Refugee Centre closed to new arrivals since early November and due to shut definitively by April, the two governments need to reach a deal on where the asylum applications of an estimated 5,000 asylum seekers registered by the Red Cross should be processed.

The controversial centre currently holds around 1,600 migrants, mainly Iraqi Kurds and Afghans, but the rest registered their names there before the lists were closed on November 5 and have gone elsewhere in France, or sneaked through to Britain via the Channel Tunnel.

The French government is offering a financial bonus of 2,000 euros (dollars) to encourage Afghans to return to their country in a program supported by the UNHCR, but so far only 15 have taken up the offer, the Interior Ministry said.

The talks here are expected to focus on a distributing the thousands of registered asylum seekers, with London agreeing to accept many of them in exchange for the final closure of the Sangatte camp which has been seen here as a major staging post for clandestine arrivals in Britain.

The right-wing ***Daily Mail*** on Monday denounced what it called "French blackmail" saying that Paris was pressurizing London to accept thousands more asylum seekers.

Sangatte was set up in 1999 to cope with the growing numbers of asylum seekers congregating at the coast in the hope of crossing to Britain, mainly through the channel tunnel, and France agreed to close it after the London government said it had become a staging-post for people-smuggling gangs.

For its part Britain has tightened up its immigration laws to reduce the country's allure, but new quarterly figures released Friday showed the number of asylum applications was up by 11 percent on the previous three months to reach 22,000.

Home Affairs spokeman for Britain's opposition Conservative Party Humfrey Malins, denounced the "disgraceful behavior" of the French and the "pathetic weakness by the British government".

"The French have no right to send asylum seekers over here although they have been doing just that for years," he said.

"It shows how weak David Blunkett is if he's prepared to accept these 5.000 extra asylum seekers as a negotiating point".