Updated at 10.20am
BUDAPEST’S MAIN INTERNATIONAL railway station has been ordered to evacuate after hundreds of migrants tried to board trains to Austria and Germany.
“No trains will be leaving or arriving at Keleti station until further notice. Would everyone please leave the premises,” a public tannoy announcement said.
The announcement came after around 500 migrants — men, women and children — tried to board the latest train to Vienna, the AFP reporter said.
Some migrants began shouting as hundreds of police, some of them riot officers, began moving people out although they offered no resistance and there were no clashes.
Several hundred then waited outside the station, from which all trains to Austria and Germany leave, as police blocked the main entrance.
Protests
Meanwhile, around 20,000 people took to the streets of Vienna yesterday to demonstrate against ill-treatment of migrants, after the bodies of 71 refugees were found in an abandoned truck last week.
Holding up large banners reading “Refugees welcome” and “I don’t want Europe to be a mass grave”, demonstrators of all ages rallied at the city’s Westbahnhof train station before heading down a major shopping thoroughfare.
A large part of the inner city had been cordoned off for the march.
As they slowly wound their way through the capital, the protesters sang Austrian pop songs about love and solidarity, to spontaneous applause from bystanders.
Among those marching were parents carrying children on their shoulders, while police officers watched from the sidelines with their helmets under their arms.
Inhumane treatment
The demonstrators, many dressed in white, congregated in front of parliament, where they lit a sea of candles.
Addressing the crowd, protest organiser Nadia Rida accused Europe of “political failure” and “inhumane treatment” of refugees.
“See how many we are — we too can move things,” she said in an emotional speech.
Authorities praised the calm nature of the demonstration after it had finished at 7:30pm. Police spokesman Patrick Maierhofer said,”There was not a single incident”.
The march took place as a service was held for the dead at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
“We’ve had enough – enough of the deaths, the suffering and the persecution,” the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, told the congregation, which included senior government members.
He said it was “too awful” to think of the plight of the migrants in the truck, four of whom were children.
The grim discovery was made in a refrigerated truck found off a motorway near the Hungarian border.
Trains carrying hundreds of migrants arrived at Westbahnhof from Budapest on Tuesday after they had been stopped at the Austrian border for several hours.
After pulling into the station, many migrants boarded a train to the Austrian city of Salzburg, while others climbed on to another one headed for Munich in southern Germany, with police looking on, an AFP correspondent at the scene said.
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