In the first ten months of the year, 2.3 times more illegal migrants were arrested by Arad County border guards on the Romanian-Hungarian border than in the first ten months of last year.
Most of the migrants came from an Asian country and tried to reach to Hungary in a truck or minibus, the Arad County Border Police said.
Authorities told Romanian news agency Agerpres on Monday that between Jan. 1 and the end of October, 759 border trespassers had been apprehended trying to reach Hungary and then Western Europe.
Only two of them are citizens of the European Union, the rest are from outside the EU, in most cases from Asian countries. Ninety percent of them tried to cross the border by hiding in a truck, while the remaining ten percent approached the neighboring state on foot or tried to evade border controls by presenting false documents.
Filip Ionuţ Matei, a spokesman for the Arad County Border Police, said that while in 2019 only 325 border violators were arrested in the county during the same period, that number had risen to 759 this year. Most arrested refugees came from Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and India.
In the latest such case, Tolna county police in Hungary, in the early hours of Tuesday, apprehended a small van with German license plates driven by a Turkish national and found 38 illegal migrants in the cargo area, all of whom declared themselves to be Syrian, but could neither prove their identity nor provide an explanation for their presence in Hungary.
The migrants will be escorted back to their point of entry while the driver faces criminal prosecution.
Title image: Nagylak (Nădlac in Romanian), the busiest crossing point on the Hungarian-Romanian border.
