Croatia bans traffic on roads to seven border crossings with Serbia

A special train transporting 800 arrived near Zagreb from the border early on Thursday, but thousands more were waiting for trains in baking sun at a tiny station near the Serb frontier.

Croatia represents a longer and more hard route into Europe, but those fleeing violence in their homelands had little choice. Ostojić said 6,500 had entered in the past 24 hours.

Croatia’s Interior Ministry has registered about 7,300 migrants by noontime on Thursday after Serbia rerouted them to cross into Croatia instead of Hungary.

Croatia’s decision to close roads crossing into Serbia could force refugees to travel across the countryside in an area still strewn with land mines laid in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, according to The Washington Post.

Hundreds jostled to get on the first buses to arrive, with riot police deployed.

Serbian police have not as yet intervened.

Stone said police had stopped him to ask how many more migrants were coming. “I don’t want to be registered in Croatia”.

“I tried to take the train to Bulgaria but the line was closed so we had to come here”, Hasan Shekh-Hasan, 25, a law student from Idlib in Syria, said at the station.

Fearing a surge of migrants from Croatia, Austria and Slovenia have called for an urgent, all-EU response.

Austrian Prime Minister Werner Faymann was holding talks Thursday in Zagreb, the Croatia capital, and Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital.

Hungary has built a barbed wire fence stretching 107 miles along its border with Serbia.

The migrants were repelled with tear gas and water cannons and police used batons to drive back those trying to enter Hungary. “Not even for transit purposes”.

Hungarian police said they detained 22 people, including one Syrian man who they said was an organizer of the attacks at Horgos who is now suspected of terrorism.

The European Union’s newest member state said it might try to stop taking in refugees, just as European Council President Donald Tusk summoned EU leaders to an extraordinary summit next Wednesday to discuss the crisis and a proposed scheme to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers across the bloc.

“(Hungary) has obligations to follow, which it looks like this new legislation would be a contravention of … both the global United Nations conventions on the status of refugees, but also European Union legislation regarding asylum and also regarding criminal procedures”, said Magdalena Majkowska-Tomkin, the head of the IOM’s Hungary office.

“They need to do something fast”. Often described sympathetically as unaccompanied minors fleeing gang violence, most of those Central American arrivals were able-bodied, tough young men who left their families in search of better economic opportunities. “I believe we have a moral duty (to) offer them protection”.

By nightfall Tuesday, thousands of migrants, including many babies and children, prepared to spend a night in the open or in flimsy tents erected in the bushes or on the main highway near the Serbian border with Hungary.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, is keen to keep refugees out of his country and out of Europe as a whole.

“We are probably seeing a protracted wave of migration that has endless reserves”, Szijjarto said, proposing two measures that Budapest says could tackle the root causes of the crisis.