Hungary's migrant crisis escalated Wednesday as police fired teargas at its main processing centre and the government announced it was sending 2,000 "border hunters" to stem the flow of record numbers of people entering from Serbia.
A police spokesman said police used the teargas to disperse around 200 migrants who had refused to be fingerprinted and trying to leave the processing center at Roszke near the border with non-EU Serbia, along which Hungary is erecting a fence, AFP reported. The spokesman, Szabolcs Szenti, said "police are trying to calm the situation, but the migrants are continuing to shout."
Police said more than 2,500 people, the highest ever daily total, poured across Hungary's southern border with Serbia near the town of Roszke on Tuesday even though a barbed-wire barrier is nearly complete. The majority were from Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan and included more than 500 children. The migrants crossing into Hungary form part of around 7,000 refugees and migrants whose journey to the European Union was blocked last week when Macedonia declared a state of emergency and shut its borders for three days after being overwhelmed by the influx.
As Europe struggles with its worst migrant crisis since World War II, Hungary has become, like Italy and Greece, a "front line" state and many of the hundreds of thousands of people trying to enter the bloc travel up through the western Balkans.
So far this year, 140,630 migrants have been intercepted crossing into Hungary, the vast majority over from Serbia. The daily number has leaped from 150 in early 2015 to more than 2,000 this month.
