Hungary: Paris fugitive recruited men amid Budapest migrants

Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a staunch opponent of accepting refugees into the European Union, said Germany struck a “secret pact” with Turkey to take in as many as half a million people.

Earlier Thursday, another Hungarian official, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Janos Lazar, went further to say Abdeslam was recruiting amid the wave of refugees and left with men who were traveling among them.

The suspect is said to be part of the entourage of Bilal Hadfi, one of the suicide bombers at the Stade de France on November 13.

While Lazar did not mention Abdeslam by name, his identity was confirmed to The Associated Press by a government spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information.

“There’ll be tremendous pressure on us” and on other central European countries “that if somebody already agreed to this – and to avoid causing a diplomatic tussle by naming the country I’m not going to say where Berlin is – that we shouldn’t just take them in but distribute them according to binding quotas”, Orban said.

AFP reported that until mid-September, when Hungary sealed its border with Serbia, thousands of migrants and refugees used to stay in makeshift camps at Keleti station. On Sept. 9, Abdeslam was also reportedly seen in Austria and was stopped along with two others during a routine traffic check.

At the time Mr. Abdeslam claimed to be on holiday.

The agreement, named after the village of Schengen in Luxembourg, allows people to move freely within the European Union without a visa, but its merit is being questioned following the deadly terror attacks in Paris last month and amid mass migration from people of non-EU member states.

Following the Paris attacks, Belgium issued an global arrest warrant against Brussels-born Abdeslam.