A car carrying six illegal immigrants who later declared themselves to be Syrian nationals crashed on Wednesday on the M1 motorway connecting Budapest to Vienna while fleeing a police control, the National Police said on its website.
Acting on information from the Migration Department of the southern Hungarian Csongrád county police, officers stopped the car with a Slovak registration plate with the intent to check the identity of its passengers, but it sped away. In the resulting high-speed chase, the driver lost control of the car and crashed it, injuring all six people inside.
Of the six people in the car, the Syrian driver had a temporary travel document issued by Germany, while the five passengers who all declared themselves to be Syrians had no documents and also could not prove they entered the country legally.
Following medical treatment at a local hospital, the five passengers were taken by police back to the Serbian border while the driver was detained and charged with people smuggling.
If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison, or up to eight years if he is found to be part of an organized group.
According to the latest police data, last week the number of illegal entries and entry attempts reached a four-year high of 1,450, with the previous largest weekly number of 2,001 registered in July 2016.
Title image: Overturned car that carried six Syrian migrants. (source: police.hu)
