Hungary allows documented refugees to board trains to Germany

Hungarian police have begun allowing refugees with travel documents and tickets to board trains to Germany, local wire service MTI and television channel M1 reported early Monday afternoon.

M1 said it appeared that all people seeking to board the international trains were being allowed on and that all people interviewed by M1's correspondent said they were Syrian. This may have been in response to information that Germany was giving priority to Syrian refugees.

Hungarian Railways (MAV) spokesperson Virag Locsei explained that no documents were needed to purchase a ticket and that train conductors were only interested in the tickets and not even allowed to ask for travel documents. Only police can do that, she said.

The civic organization Migration Aid said that at least 2,000 people were in the transit facilities set up by the railway stations. Spokesperson Zsuzsanna Zsohar called on the Hungarian authorities to allow all people who have been registered as Syrians to travel on to Germany.

Zsohar charged that Hungarian immigration authorities had not worked for six days out of the past two weeks, when there were holidays in Hungary, during which some 12,000 refugees were not registered and given papers.

The unregistered people have received no official assistance either, she added.

Zsohar said that many people officially registered had still failed to receive food or beverages, and that refugees were not being provided with interpreters.

Children, she said, were being forced to travel alone for hundreds of kilometers despite laws prohibiting this.

Meanwhile, Austrian authorities have allowed car traffic on the M1-A4 motorway linking Budapest and Vienna to move forward, but the 30 km backup had not been reduced. Authorities are searching for people-smugglers following the suffocation deaths of 71 refugees in a truck on this motorway last Thursday.

The Hungarian Maltese Charities has set up water distribution sites along the motorway as temperatures soared into the 30s Celsius in an unusually late heat wave. Gyor-Sopron County Disaster Management spokesperson Anita Takacs Ruska said that in addition to the water being distributed, fire trucks and ambulances was cruising along the motorway to help travelers as needed.

On the Serbian border, Hungary has finished building a 1.5-meter high temporary razor-wire fence along the 175 km of border. The Defense Ministry said that it was now working on putting up a 4-meter high fence to go behind the razor-wire. Endit