Migrants transiting through Macedonia jam trains

Police additionally stated they detained three Syrians on Sunday close to the southern border with Greece, when a crowd of migrants threw stones, bottles and footwear at police trying to revive order on the Gevgelija railway station the place lots of try and board Serbia-bound trains.

Over 3,600 illegal migrants have come to Macedonia in the past 3 days, Macedonian Dnevnik daily writes. Along the way, they often fall prey to people smugglers and criminal gangs.

Tensions ran high at the station, some 170 kilometres south of capital Skopje, as asylum seekers appearing to be from the Middle East ran and pushed their way onto the train for Tabanovci on the Serbian border. More than a thousand migrants take this route every day. Tempers flared at the ticket booths and the platform.

Macedonian authorities provide 3-day transit visas so that migrants are not left stranded in the country.

“It is clear that the EU wants migrants to stay in Serbia permanently, and only a naive man could possibly think that Brussels does not back the construction of a wall along Hungary’s border with Serbia”, notes the release.

In Gevgelija, the migrants – many among them children – sleep and sit on mats on the ground, “or wherever they can”, Tanjug said.

That number has shot up to 1,500.