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First Refugee Trains Begin Arriving In Austria

Trains packed with hundreds of migrants - many fleeing war and persecution - have started to arrive in Vienna as they near their goal of making it to Germany.

Upon pulling in to the Austrian capital, many made a run for services heading west - witnesses said police stood by and did not try to intervene.

A train with about 200 migrants on board also arrived in Munich on Monday evening.

"Thank God nobody asked for a passport ... No police, no problem," said Khalil, a teacher from Syria, who arrived in Vienna with his wife and sick baby daughter.

The refugees began their train journeys from Budapest in Hungary, with one stopped for a time on the Hungary-Austria border.

Local officials said the service was stopped at Hegyeshalom due to "overcrowding".

A Reuters reporter on board said they were halted for several hours in hot conditions before being allowed to continue.

Despite a police spokesman insisting only passengers who had not already applied for asylum in Hungary would be allowed to enter, the train continued its journey - with all the migrants seemingly allowed to stay on.

On the roads, new checks on vehicles crossing borders between Austria and Hungary have also caused huge tailbacks.

Drivers on the M1 motorway faced jams of up to 18 miles and delays were reported on other roads as tighter controls aimed at stopping people smuggling were introduced.

Officials said 200 asylum seekers and five suspected people traffickers had been found during the first few hours of the operation.

Konrad Kogler, director general for public security at Austria's interior ministry, said the checks had been agreed with Germany, Hungary and Slovakia, and did not violate the Schengen agreement which guarantees the free movement of people in the EU.

"It is about ensuring that people are safe, that they are not dying, on the one hand, and about traffic security, on the other," he said.

The state government of Bavaria, which controls all of Germany's border crossing with Austria has also begun stopping vehicles on highways near the border.

Most of the refugees say they hope to claim asylum in the country.

Austrian authorities decided to increase checks after 71 refugees were found dead in an abandoned lorry last week.

Hungarian police have arrested five people over the deaths in the refrigerated lorry, which had been parked for about 24 hours before officers arrived and found the partially decomposed remains.

Police said 59 of those who suffocated in the cramped conditions were men, eight were women and four were children, including one baby girl.

Hungary is the gateway to the European Union for migrants crossing by land from nations including Syria and Afghanistan, across Macedonia and Serbia.

Army engineers have begun building a 4m-high fence along the border with non-EU member Serbia in an attempt to control the problem.

Greece's coast guard picked up nearly 2,500 migrants over the weekend, with many being moved from the country's eastern islands to Piraeus on a passenger ferry on Monday.

Norway has also revealed that a trickle of intrepid asylum seekers have turned up at a remote Arctic border with Russia this year.

Police Chief Inspector Goeran Stenseth said 151 people have crossed near the northeastern town of Kirkenes, some picking up bicycles because the Storskog border post is not open to pedestrians.

In France, European authorities have given five million euros (£3.6m) to build a new camp to help 1,500 migrants from Sudan, Eritrea and elsewhere gathered in Calais in an attempt to cross to Britain.

European Union ministers will gather for an extraordinary meeting to discuss how to tackle the crisis of "unprecedented proportions" .

Luxembourg, which holds the rotating EU presidency, called interior ministers from all 28 member states to the talks on 14 September.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged European nations to accept binding quotas that will spread the refugees across the union.

"Europe as a whole must move and its states must share the responsibility for refugees seeking asylum," she told reporters in Berlin.