4,500 refugees taken to Austrian border in Hungarian bus-lift

About 4,500 refugees had been transported to the Austrian border by bus overnight, where they crossed over to the Austrian side on foot, a senior Hungarian government official said Saturday.

Karoly Kontrat, state secretary at the Ministry of the Interior, told a Saturday morning news conference that many walked the final kilometers in pouring rain because nearly 100 buses were backed up on the motorway.

Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs was at the border early on Saturday to coordinate the crossing. He said Hungarian government will not be providing any more buses.

Hungarian and Austrian civil organizations and volunteers were on hand to assist the refugees at the border, local wire service MTI reported.

Miklos Vecsei of television news channel M1 said the hardest part of the transfer was to convince people that they really would be taken to the border and would not be tricked. Many people felt betrayed on Thursday, when a train supposed to be headed for the border at Sopron halted in Bicske, some 35 kilometers west of Budapest, resulting in a two-day standoff between about 500 refugees and police at the Bicske railway station.

As of Saturday morning the backup on the motorway was about 10 kilometers and included some 35-40 buses. Austrian authorities turned traffic around and sent the vehicles back into Hungary. Pedestrians were being allowed to cross.

Meanwhile, some 250 people who had been housed in a refugee camp at Bicske left the camp and began walking towards Vienna along the shoulder of the M1 motorway. Police sent an escort but traffic has not been halted.

Another 200, housed in Vamosszabadi, a town near the Slovak border about halfway between Budapest and Vienna, left the camp on foot and by 9 am were at the city of Gyor (123 kilometers west of Budapest and 122 kilometers east of Vienna along the M1 motorway).

Budapest's Eastern (Keleti) Railway Station re-opened to international traffic on Saturday morning, and the first train, a Eurocity Express going to Berlin by way of Bratislava and Prague, left shortly after 10 am local time. Trains to Vienna and to Germany by way of Vienna are scheduled to depart in the early afternoon, a Hungarian Railways (MAV) media spokesperson said. International traffic had been halted since Thursday.

Loudspeakers have been announcing trains and destinations in Hungarian and English and authorities are apparently allowing ticketed refugees to board them, ending the standoff.

The underpass in front of the station, from which the refugees had been collected overnight and bused to the border, has now been filling up with the next batch of refugees to cross into Hungary.

At noon on Saturday some 300-500 people began the trek from the railway station to Vienna, news portal Index.hu reported, saying they had come from a holding facility in Debrecen in eastern Hungary and were determined to walk to Germany if need be.

In the interim, 1,817 people including 423 children were apprehended overnight Friday/Saturday after illegally crossing the border from Serbia, Szabolcs Szenti, spokesman for the Csongrad County police department reported, adding that most claimed Syrian nationality. 2,181 had been halted a day earlier. Endit