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Hungary busing migrants to border; Austria, Germany will accept them (w/video)

 
About 1,200 refugees leave the Keleti railroad station in Buda?pest, Hungary, on Friday, beginning a 300-mile walk to the Austrian border. Austria will allow the refugees to enter.
About 1,200 refugees leave the Keleti railroad station in Buda?pest, Hungary, on Friday, beginning a 300-mile walk to the Austrian border. Austria will allow the refugees to enter.
Published Sept. 5, 2015

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Thousands of refugees who have been bottled up in Hungary, demanding passage to the West, will be allowed into Austria and Germany, the Austrian chancellor said late Friday.

After several days of chaos and civil disobedience by the migrants, Hungarian officials threw in the towel and allowed the people living in a squalid encampment in a below-ground plaza outside the city's main train station onto more than 40 buses headed for the Austrian border, as they had been demanding.

"On the basis of the current situation of need, Austria and Germany agree to allow in this case the onward journey of these refugees into their countries," Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria wrote on his Facebook page.

An aide to Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the buses would transport the thousands still gathered at the Keleti railroad station in Budapest and the approximately 1,200 people who stormed out of the train station earlier Friday and set off on foot toward the Austrian border 300 miles away.

The people in the encampment had hoped to travel by train to Austria and then on to Germany, and the Hungarian authorities had let six trainloads of them through on Monday before shutting down all international rail traffic to the West.

After a confusing night, in which the police warned that soccer hooligans were planning to attack the encampment, the promised buses finally began arriving around 1 a.m. today, to cheering and clapping from the weary migrants.

Officials said that more than a thousand other migrants who had begun walking Friday down the M1 motorway, the country's main road to the West, severely disrupting traffic, would also be picked up and driven to the border.

By 2 a.m., police said, 40 buses had departed. Migrants waved happily to onlookers as they pulled away.

The decision to let the migrants go came at an emergency session of top Hungarian officials Friday, and was made both for humanitarian reasons and to ease the pressure on the nation's transit system, said Janos Lazar, the prime minister's chief of staff.