BUDAPEST (Reuters) – One person died and eight people including four children were injured in Hungary near the Serbian border on Friday when a car carrying migrants crashed with a truck, authorities said.
Renata Papp, mayor of Asotthalom village where the accident occurred, said on Facebook the car driver, a smuggler, was lifted from the wreckage by another smuggler and whisked away in another car.
An ambulance spokesman Jozsef Hanga said three children suffered life-threatening injuries.
Police figures have shown a jump in illegal migrant crossings on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia in the past months, arriving on the so-called Balkans route. With the help of smugglers they head for Slovakia or Austria.
The migrants, predominantly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, enter Hungary from Serbia despite a steel fence that Prime Minister Viktor Orban had built after the 2015 migration crisis that rocked Europe.
(Reporting by Krisztina Than and Krisztina Fenyo; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
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