This is a huge increase from the same period last year, György Bakondi said.Continue reading
Hungary’s southern border with Serbia is “under great pressure of migration”, the national police (ORFK) said on Friday, adding that the number of actions taken had tripled in the first seven months of the year compared to the same period last year.
Since the beginning of the year, police have intervened on 53,297 occasions compared to 17,442 between January-August in 2020, ORFK leaders told a press conference.
Department head Zoltán Boross said that 501 people smugglers had been apprehended this year, compared to 414 last year, adding that 459 legal proceedings had been initiated this year, “more than the figure for the whole of last year”.
Gergely Czuczor, a deputy head of department at ORFK, said that the police had thwarted 26,600 illegal entries since the beginning of the year, while 23,683 illegal entrants had been apprehended close to the border on Hungarian territory and a further 200 inside the country.
Czuczor said that the number of asylum seekers in Hungary had been reduced from 92,000 to 48,000 during the past year.
Featured photo illustration by Tibor Rosta/MTI