Chaos erupted as crowds of people burst into the flashpoint station and rushed towards a standing train, with Hungarian police seemingly absent following a two-day stand-off with refugees trying to head to Germany and Austria.
Advertisement
Hungarian Railways said however that there would be no trains going to western Europe.
Keleti had been closed for two days, but migrants poured into the terminal on Thursday as police withdrew.
They boarded trains waiting at the platforms despite announcements, including in English over station loudspeakers, that the trains were not heading west.
Hungarian authorities have made efforts to lock down its borders over the past few weeks, as it is becoming a main thoroughfare for the thousands of migrants and refugees entering Europe.
“We Hungarians are full of fear, people in Europe are full of fear because they see that the European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not able to control the situation”, Orban said and announced his country would launch a package of regulations by September 15, including a physical barrier to stop migrants from entering Hungary.
“The people want us to master the situation and protect our borders”, he wrote in an opinion piece for Germany’s Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius accused Sunday eastern European states, namely Hungary, of pursuing a “scandalous” policy against refugees, including erecting a fence on its southern border with Serbia.
Police earlier stopped the first train bound for the town of Sopron near the Austrian border, ordering migrants off at Bicske, where Hungary has a migrant reception center.
Orban is expected to meet with the leaders of the other EU members to discuss the matter, even as Italy and Germany have been advocating a fairer distribution of migrant responsibility among all the European countries.
A man, wife and baby broke onto the track next to the train and lay down in protest.
Orban has taken a consistently hard line on the migrant crisis engulfing Europe, refusing to accept an European Union plan for compulsory quotas for asylum seekers and building a razor wire fence along the border with Serbia in a bid to halt the influx. “They hope that somehow they will get to Austria or Germany”.
But European Parliament President Schulz disagreed, saying the problem is not one for Germany only, but for all of Europe.
Police ordered the migrants off the train, who shouted ‘No camp, no camp!’
“We could take 800 Muslims but we don’t have any mosques in Slovakia so how can Muslims be integrated if they are not going to like it here?”
‘So if the German Chancellor insists on it, Hungary must register them’.
Advertisement
There were bewildered and exhausted-looking families with young children, many of whom have been camped out for days in a makeshift refugee camp below Keleti station.
