Train with refugees stopped before entering Slovenia

Train with refugees stopped before entering Slovenia

The refugees who traveled on the train continued their journey on foot. They were stopped by a fence and Slovenian police officers with dogs who prevented them from entering the country.

The Slovenian police have launched "intensive border protection" today, a spokesman in Maribor, Bojan Kitel, said, according to Hina.

The refugees and migrants traveling on the train were offered the possibility of applying for asylum and staying in Croatia, but all decided to continue on foot, walking along the rail tracks, before being stopped at the border.

They were redirected to the nearby road border crossing of Trnovec, but were stopped there was well.

UNHCR representatives rejected the possibility of only about 150 of the most vulnerable among the refugees being allowed to cross the border, as that would have separated families. Therefore 1,800 people, many of them children, continue to wait, in the rain and cold weather, to enter Slovenia.

Hina is reporting that it learned unofficially some 300 migrants from six buses managed to cross the border at the crossing of Banfi, and that, considering this is a small crossing, the small-sized deployment of the Slovanian police was not ready "to accept" so many people.

A new train with 2,100 migrants is expected to arrive in Cakovec on Monday - a town "that has not capacity to accept so many people."

The Austrian Interior Ministry, meanwhile, said there were no changes on the Slovenian-Austrian border concerning the crossing of refugees, and that they can enter the country.

Previously, Slovenian Interior Minister Vesna Djerkes-Znidar announced that her Austrian counterpart Johanna Mikl-Leitner informed her during a telephone conversation that Austria "for now can no longer accept refugees from Slovenia, as it has difficulties providing for them once they enter the country.."

The Austrian Interior Ministry said that the Slovenian minister asked her Austrian colleague to allow more refugees to enter daily, and that this proposal was rejected, but that there were no changes regarding the crossing of the border, and that the two ministers "did not discuss a concrete number of refugees."

After Hungary closed its border with Croatia, refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, headed toward richer countries of the EU, started traveling via Slovenia.

At the same time, Slovenia set a daily limit and will accept up to 2,500 people arriving from Croatia each day, BBC reported.