In the early hours of Thursday morning, a vehicle carrying migrants crashed near Hungary’s southern border with Serbia. Two people are reported dead and six injured.
A Hungarian police statement said the car carrying the migrants hit a tree and turned over not far from Hungary's southern border with Serbia. The car, which the news agency Reuters reported had a French number plate, was being driven by a suspected smuggler, and did not stop at police checks at the border.
Just before the accident happened, the car is said to have accelerated and then crashed. Police report that two people died and six people were injured. It was not confirmed how many people in total were in the vehicle.
Hungarian police, like other border control forces along the Balkan route, have been registering an increase in the numbers of migrants attempting to cross their borders without papers in the last few months.
Typically, those who cross from Serbia into Hungary then hope to get through Slovakia or Austria before traveling on into Western Europe.
Frequent car crashes
Most of the people traveling on this route are young men from the Middle East and Afghanistan, however, the nationality or gender of those involved in this particular accident was not specified.
Crashes of this kind occur relatively frequently in the region. According to reporting in The Guardian in September this year, human rights groups working in Serbia have said that there have been at least four crashes following police car chases of cars carrying migrants in the past year.
The Guardian discovered a further 20 cases in Hungary that had been reported in the Hungarian or international media since June 2021.
A volunteer with local NGO Medical Volunteers International (MVI) named Elisabeth Jennings also told The Guardian that they had observed an increasing number of traffic accidents involving cars carrying migrants.
The British daily also spoke to one Syrian man, whom they called Karim* who was involved in one such crash in 2022. Karim told that newspaper that he had been traveling in a car with 18 other migrants, adding that they were not far from the Austrian border in Hungary when police began chasing the vehicle.
"I remember I was asleep in the car, so I was not sure if we had really had an accident. But then I am in the hospital bed and I cannot move at all," Karim told The Guardian.
In the crash Karim was involved in, the car is thought to have hit a crash barrier. Two people also died in the incident, Karim explained.
Forcibly deported despite injuries
Although Karim says he tried to lodge an asylum claim in Hungary with the help of an NGO, the Hungarian police arrived before a representative could come to the hospital to talk about his claim.
He says he soon was deported to Serbia. At the time of his deportation, Karim says he was still unable to move his arm and was wearing a neck brace.
Eventually, according to the report in The Guardian, Karim tried again to cross the border and finally made it to Germany. There, he was told he should be deported to Bulgaria, which under the Dublin regulation was the first EU country he entered in the bloc.
But after six months seeking church asylum, Karim finally received a temporary residence permit in Germany.
Another man, who also was in contact with MVI, claimed that Hungarian police had threatened him to keep quiet about the car chase which caused him to be in hospital.
Like Karim, he later was also forced back to Serbia, he said.
Hospitalized and then pushed back
Rights groups working in northern Serbia also told The Guardian that they had documented 40 similar pushbacks from hospitals in Hungary. At least 13 of these people had reportedly been injured in car crashes.
They say that so far in 2023, they have come across 12 incidents where people were pushed back from a Hungarian hospital, with five of those being linked to a car accident.
MVI's Jennings meanwhile told The Guardian that she had seen cases where people had "life-threatening or severe injuries" and still were pushed back.
A lack of available translators in Hungarian hospitals often means that migrants don't always understand what is wrong with them or how to seek any continuing care they might need.
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Balkan route towards Germany and beyond
Most of the Hungarian-Serbian border is covered in a steel fence which Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had built after the numbers entering Europe via the Balkan route shot up in 2015.
However, in spite of the fence and frequent border controls, migrants repeatedly attempt to scale the fence, or cut their way through it with the help of smuggling gangs.
Studies have found that the smuggling networks tend to work with local experts who know each border area. The groups of migrants who make it through are typically met by a series of different agents, who help inch them towards their goal using different means - including high velocity vehicle journeys.
*Not his real name, attributed by the Guardian to protect his identity
With Reuters