Hungary accuses Croatia of "dumping" refugees on joint border

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto on Saturday slammed Croatia for sending buses and trains packed with migrants over their joint border.

Szijjarto called the Croatian authorities "shameless" for lying about having had Budapest's agreement in bringing masses of refugees over the border to Hungary, Hungarian wire service MTI reported.

He made the remarks while addressing a news conference in Dunakeszi, just north of the Budapest city line.

Szijjarto called the move a serious violation of Hungary's sovereignty and said Croatia had essentially "abandoned" its cooperation not only with Hungary but with all of Europe.

The Croatians have been lying to the Hungarian and European people when instead of providing care for the migrants, they have failed to register them and instead have "dumped them in Hungary," he said.

Earlier, speaking at a news conference in the southern town Mohacs near both the Serbian and Croatian borders, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said the Croatians were regularly transporting asylum-seekers to the Hungarian border.

This, Kovacs said, means Croatia has left both Hungary and the European Union in the lurch, refusing to meet any of its legal obligations.

Hungary was registering and providing care for the people thus brought into the country, he added.

Gyorgy Bakondi, the prime minister's chief advisor on internal security said earlier that over 11,000 people had arrived at various Croatian border towns on Friday and Saturday where they were taken to a registration facility near the Austrian border. He acknowledged that many people chose to walk on to Austria rather than enter the facility to register.

Bakondi also said that the first line of a 41 km (about 25 mile) fence on the Croatian border was in place but building an actual fence would be more difficult than it had been in Serbia, given the differing terrain.

Bakondi said there were currently 1,068 people at the various reception facilities.

Meanwhile, Hungary's left-wing political parties have been highly critical of the government. The socialist MSZP blamed the government for causing the chaos. MSZP party chair Jozsef Tobias called on Szijjarto to stop running amok, saying slowly there won't be any country left that he hasn't had a spat with. The Liberal Party merely said that Hungarian government communications and foreign policy were in a state of chaos. Enditem