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Hungary migrant crisis escalates as police fire tear gas

27 August 2015 04:07 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Hungary's migrant crisis escalated Wednesday as police fired tear gas at the EU country's main processing centre and the government announced 2,000 "border hunters" to stem the flow of record numbers of people entering, APA reports quoting AFP.

With more than 2,500 people crossing from non-EU Serbia on Tuesday alone, pushing to total for the year above 140,000, Hungary's right-wing ruling party said it wanted to deploy the army.

Police used tear gas Wednesday morning to disperse around 200 migrants who had refused to be fingerprinted and were trying to leave the processing centre at Roszke near the Serbian border.

An AFP correspondent at the scene said the situation inside the centre has since calmed down.

Another spokesman said the migrants wanted to leave the centre after news circulated that Germany was easing asylum rules for people fleeing the war in Syria.

More migrants crossed over on Wednesday, the AFP correspondent said, although for the most part they were waiting for nightfall to try to avoid Hungarian border police.

At a police collecting point where migrants were gathered before being brought to Roszke, around 150-200 were sitting waiting in the hot sun next to corn fields as their children played.

Tuesday's record daily total of 2,500 people pouring over the border was despite Hungarian authorities having installed along much of the border a barbed-wire barrier that video footage showed is far from insurmountable.

The majority of the latest arrivals were from Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and included more than 500 children. Most want to travel onto western European countries such as Germany and Sweden.

"We left because we were scared, we had fear, bombs, war, killing, death... That's why we left Syria," one Syrian man heading for the Hungarian border told AFP.

"If I go to Europe, I think it's going to be better... better than my life in Syria."

The migrants crossing into Hungary form part of around 7,000 whose journey was blocked last week when Macedonia declared a state of emergency and shut its borders for three days after being overwhelmed by the influx.