“None of the 130 migrants who arrived at the Horgos border crossing station on Sunday have submitted a request for asylum”, the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisor on Homeland Security said on Hungarian M1 television’s Monday morning current affairs programme.

György Bakondi was asked about the fact that 300-400, mainly Afghan and Pakistani migrants set out on foot from Belgrade towards the Hungarian border on Friday afternoon, of whom 130 reached the border crossing station at Horgos on Sunday. On Sunday, the immigrants told a reporter from M1 television that they had come to protest about the closed border and strict regulations, and were planning to hold a hunger strike at the border for 3-4 days.

The Chief Security Advisor said: “The fact that they have not submitted requests for asylum may also have something to do with the fact that migrants are behaving according to a system they have set up themselves at the border crossing station according to which single men only come after families with children and the old and sick, and the 130 people who arrived on Sunday are all single men”.

“Initiatives such as these are often not even organised by the migrants, but by various non-governmental organisations, for which they tape over the migrants’ mouths and provide them with English-language placards. They are certainly trying to put pressure on the Hungarian border in an attempt to “intimidate the Hungarian Government and authorities and scare them into letting everyone through into Austria”, he said. “This will not happen”, he declared.

In reply to a question concerning whether the crowd of about two thousand that has accumulated at Horgos might attempt to break through the border, the Chief Security Advisor said he didn’t wish to enter into conjecture; the 130 people who arrived on Sunday are sitting peacefully for the moment, separate from the other migrants.

“166 attempts to illegally cross the border occurred between 00.00 and 06:00 hours on Monday along the Bács-Kiskun County stretch of the border, so there is no reduction in the pressure on the Hungarian-Serbian border”, he added.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)