BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Hungarian police fired shots at a truck carrying around 30 people presumed to be illegal migrants on Thursday after it drove through a checkpoint at the border with Austria without stopping, police said.
The Gyor-Moson-Sopron county police said police patrols at the border village of Harka spotted the truck driving at speed towards the crossing.
An officer stepped in front of the truck signalling it had to stop for checks. But it accelerated instead, forcing him to jump out of its path while a colleague fired shots trying to force the vehicle to change direction, police said in a statement on their website late on Thursday.
The truck, which had a Hungarian number plate, drove across the border and then broke down. Austrian police detained its Egyptian driver and some 30 passengers of unknown nationalities in the back of the truck, Hungarian police said.
According to police data, Hungarian authorities turned back around 2,000-2,500 migrants at the country’s southern border with Serbia and Romania per week in the last weeks of 2021. Hungary built a fence along the Serbian border to stop migrants from entering in 2015.
(Reporting by Krisztina Than; editing by John Stonestreet)
