Some 27,000 migrants came to Croatia in the past five days, arriving from Serbia after finding their intended path to western Europe blocked by a 175km fence Hungary erected at great cost on its southern border with Serbia.
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An official said eight people were rescued and that a search-and-rescue mission was under way, according to the Associated Press.
Croatian buses carried hundreds of people Saturday to the Beremend crossing in Hungary.
“Croatia has shown it has a heart,” he said. He said he didn’t care where in Europe he would end up as long as he could live in peace and find a job.
About 8,000 asylum seekers gathered in the Austrian town of Nickelsdorf on the border with Hungary, where Austrian soldiers guarded them as officials sought transport and places for them to sleep in the country’s overstretched asylum system.
Early on Sunday, Hungary also reopened its main border crossing with Serbia, although it is as yet unclear if migrants and refugees will be allowed to cross and in what numbers.
Four children were among the victims of the accident involving a boat carrying 46 migrants from the northwestern Turkish port of Canakkale to the Greek island of Lesbos, Dogan news agency reported. But migrants abandoned the supplies when word of the train spread through their makeshift encampment, leaving tents, rain slickers and food strewn across the town square.
Migrants walk through a police cordon at the Austria-Slovenia border crossing in Spielfeld, Austria.
Soldiers, police and volunteers are working together to establish order on the Austrian border as about 7,000 people crowd the crossing at Nickelsdorf, near Vienna. It was an orderly scene, in contrast to Wednesday, when Hungarian riot police officers used water cannons and tear gas at a crossing on the border with Serbia, a crackdown condemned by the United Nations secretary-general and other world leaders.
A policeman lifts a migrants child as they desperately try and board a train heading for Zagreb from Tovarnik station on September 20, 2015 in Tovarnik, Croatia.
Hungary’s erection of razor-wire fences is deeply straining its ties with neighboring countries, who feel the problem of the huge flow of migrants is being unfairly pushed onto them. However, sources told Croatian daily Vecernji List that if Hungary tried to close the border, the government would enact a plan C, which would see authorities send the refugees to the border in an uncontrolled manner, which would make it harder for the Hungarians to deal with the influx.
This, Kovacs said, means Croatia has left both Hungary and the European Union in the lurch, refusing to meet any of its legal obligations.
The money will be taken from funds allocated for Turkey, Hahn said in a visit to a migrant reception centre at Gevegilja, in Macedonia.
Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said he hadn’t discussed the train with his Hungarian counterpart before it headed toward Hungary.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced at a news conference in Berlin on Sunday that the US will increase the total number of refugees it will admit each year, to 85,000 next fiscal year and 100,000 the year after. “That’s the way it’s going to be now, whether the Romanian foreign minister likes it or not”, Mr Szijjarto said.
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Meanwhile, thousands more continue to embark on desperate journeys across the Mediterranean, with the Italian coastguard rescuing 4,343 people from smugglers’ boats off the coast of Libya in the space of just 24 hours.
