After a police chase, a van with 29 migrants on board crashed in the Czech Republic. Six people were seriously injured and 15 had minor to moderate injuries, a police spokesman said on Saturday, according to the CTK agency. Five children were among the injured. The rescue workers were on site with a large contingent. Coming from Slovakia, the driver of the van did not stop at the border control at the Lanzhot crossing. In pursuit, he is said to have tried to force a police car off the road.
Rescue workers and police at the scene of the accident
Eventually he lost control of the vehicle at an intersection in Breclav and crashed into two parked cars, a road sign and a house. According to media reports, the migrants came from Syria. Breclav is around 230 kilometers south-east of Prague. The Czech Republic temporarily reintroduced border controls with Slovakia on Thursday. This was justified with an increase in illegally entering migrants on the so-called Balkan route to Western Europe.
Significant increase in illegal entries
According to a newspaper report, the number of people entering Germany illegally has increased significantly in recent months. The “focal point” is the German-Czech border with 11,827 registered cases from the beginning of the year to the end of September, the “Rheinische Post” reported on Saturday, citing data from the federal police. In the whole of 2021, only about 4,200 illegal entries were reported at this border.
In August and September 2022 alone, more than 6,500 were reported, a federal police spokesman told the newspaper. According to the “Rheinische Post”, the authority put the total number of illegal entries into Germany in the current year at around 56,800. According to the federal government’s migration report, there were almost 35,500 in 2020 as a whole. The report for 2021 is not yet available.
The newspaper quoted the federal police as saying that “an increasing trend in the number of unauthorized entries detected” is “particularly noticeable at the German eastern and southern borders (to Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland) in the current year”. Every day, the authority records an average of more than 400 people who have entered the country illegally in its area of responsibility.
bri/qu (dpa,afp)
