Chaos in Hungary as figures show gravity of Europe migrant crisis

BUDAPEST: Hungarian police evacuated Budapest’s main international rail station on Tuesday after hundreds of migrants tried to board trains to western Europe, as new figures showed more than 350,000 have risked their lives so far this year crossing the Mediterranean.
With tensions high as hundreds of police, some in riot gear, moved people out of Keleti station, statistics from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) revealed the gravity of the crisis facing the continent with the biggest movement of people since World War II.
Over 234,770 migrants have landed in Greece alone this year, the IOM said, more than the whole Europe-wide figure of 219,000 for all of 2014.
At least 2,600 died on the hazardous journey, drowned or suffocated in dangerous or unseaworthy boats, it added.
Another 114,276 made it to Italy, with most of the other arrivals split between Spain and the island of Malta.
Although there were no clashes between migrants and police in Budapest, several hundred refugees staged an angry demonstration outside the station, an AFP correspondent said.
“Germany! Germany! We want to leave!” chanted the crowd, with some holding their babies up in the air.
The station later re-opened but only for non-migrants.
The move came just 24 hours after the EU’s border control procedures were thrown into chaos when police allowed people stuck for days in makeshift refugee camps to leave the Hungarian capital on trains bound for Germany and Austria, despite many not having EU visas.
The decision led the highest number of migrants entering Austria in a single day this year, police confirmed, with 3,650 arriving in Vienna by train on Monday.
Many of the migrants slept at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station, hoping to continue on their journey to Germany, which last week eased asylum restrictions for Syrian refugees.
German police said 2,200 asylum-seekers had turned up in Bavaria by Tuesday morning, many having managed to switch trains in Vienna. The southern German state’s Interior Minister, Joachim Herrmman, said they would not be returned to Hungary.
The wave of people fleeing war, persecution and poverty in the Middle East and Africa “is the greatest challenge for Europe in the coming years”, Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said on Tuesday on a visit to Berlin.
The migrants’ plight was brought sharply into focus last week after 71 people, including four children, were found dead in an abandoned truck on an Austrian motorway near the Hungarian border.
So far, police in Hungary and Bulgaria have arrested seven people in connection with the truck tragedy, among them four Bulgarians and one Afghan. The nationalities of the other two were not known.
The grim discovery led to a security crackdown in Austria with huge tailbacks forming along the border on Monday and Tuesday, as officers inspected vehicles in search of people-smugglers and migrants.