Prime minister’s chief of staff says buses will collect people from Budapest’s main railway station – and also the estimated 1,200 who are walking to the border
According to theguardian Hungary will transport thousands of refugees by bus to the Austrian border, a spokesman for prime minister Viktor Orban said on Friday night.
The buses will be sent to pick up the thousands of migrants at Budapest’s main railway terminus and the approximately 1,200 who are walking along the main westward motorway towards Austria, chief of staff János Lázár told a news conference.
“This does not automatically mean that they can leave the country,” he said. “We are waiting for the Austrian government’s response.”
Lazar’s announcement came as the estimated 1,200 people – young and old, some in wheelchairs or on crutches, others barefoot, some with children in buggies, others with toddlers on their shoulders – set off to walk the 105 miles from Budapest’s main railway station to Austria, as Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the second world war deepened.
Snaking through the city in a line nearly half a mile long, the column was one of at least three groups of desperate, mainly Syrian refugees and migrants blocked by Hungarian authorities from travelling by train to Austria and Germany, who decided on Friday to take their fate in their hands and attempt the journey by foot.
There was one toilet for each thousand people,” said Moaz, aconfectioner from Syria, travelling with seven members of his family. “It was such a bad situation in the station that I would rather just end up in the forest.” Reen, a young mother, asked simply: “What else can we do?”Marching through grand boulevards and down a motorway in the blazing midday sun, dodging traffic but with no respite from the heat and very little water, many of the crowd who had spent days camping in the concourse beneath the capital’s Keleti station heard of the march only as the main group left and were left with no time to gather supplies or even possessions.
“There was one toilet for each thousand people,” said Moaz, aconfectioner from Syria, travelling with seven members of his family. “It was such a bad situation in the station that I would rather just end up in the forest.” Reen, a young mother, asked simply: “What else can we do?”
Beside her hobbled 22-year-old Mahmoud from Damascus, struggling on a pair of crutches because of his injured legs. He was lifted up and carried on the backs and shoulders of his friends every time he fell behind.
Thirty miles north-west of Budapest, up to 350 of 500 refugees stranded for more than 24 hours on a train at the town of Bicske were also on the move, breaking through a police cordon to begin the long walk westwards.
Taken by surprise, riot police were able to stop only a few of those people on board from fleeing, Associated Press reported. A Pakistani man reportedly died when he fell and hit his head on the tracks during the breakout.
After being told by Hungarian Railways that all international traffic to westernEurope had been suspended “for security reasons”, the frustrated passengers, many holding tickets for Berlin or Vienna, boarded the train on Thursday, believing it was heading to a town close to the Austrian border, from where they could eventually reach Germany – the preferred destination for most, since it recently eased restrictions on accepting Syrian refugees.
But the carriages were halted less than half an hour after leaving the capital by security forces, who tried to move the refugees to a nearby processing camp. For much of Friday, they refused to budge, turning away offers of water, fruits and sweets and shouting “No food! No food!” in protest.
“The situation is so bad,” said Adnan Shanan, 35, from Latakia in Syria, who said he was fleeing war in his homeland. “We have many sick people on the train. We have pregnant women, no food, no water. We don’t need to stay here one more day. We need to move on to Munich, to anywhere else. We can’t stay here. We can’t wait until tomorrow.”
In Budapest, parliament passed a series of laws effectively sealing Hungary’s southern border to migrants – about 140,000 of whom have crossed it so far this year – and creating “transit zones” to hold asylum seekers until their asylum requests are approved and deported if not. A group of 64 migrants broke out of the camp at Bicske on Friday, while Hungary’s main border crossing with Serbia was closed temporarily after about 300 of the 2,300 people in the nearby Röszke holding centre escaped through a fence. “In the interest of preventing accidents, the Röszke motorway border crossing has been closed to incoming traffic and traffic is being redirected,” police said.
New laws will make it a criminal offence to cross or damage Hungary’s controversial new razor-wire fence along its 108-mile border with Serbia and make illegal border crossings punishable by up to three years in prison
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