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Migrants Spend Night Outside Budapest Station

Thousands of migrants, many of them refugees from Syria, have been stranded outside a train station in Budapest after they were stopped from boarding trains to Germany.

The migrants slept on the streets overnight, many guarded by police, after protesting for hours outside the Hungarian capital's main railway station.

On Tuesday, Hungarian police forced hundreds of them out of the Keleti terminal as the government temporarily suspended all rail traffic there.

It comes as the foreign minister said the country planned to register all refugees, but economic migrants will be sent back to the state from where they entered Hungary.

Authorities firstly shut the capital's station and then re-opened it but stopped migrants from entering.

A large crowd gathered outside, some of whom shouted "Germany, Germany" and "Freedom! Freedom!".

Several said they had spent hundreds of euros on tickets.

Scuffles broke out earlier as migrants pushed toward metal gates at a platform where a train was scheduled to leave for Vienna and Munich, and were blocked by police.

The latest move marks a U-turn for Hungary which over the weekend had started to allow migrants to travel by train to western Europe without going through asylum procedures.

The closure of the station appeared prompted in part by pressure from other European Union nations trying to cope with the influx of thousands of migrants flowing through Hungary.

Trainloads of migrants arrived in Austria and Germany from Hungary on Monday as asylum rules collapsed under the strain of a wave of migration unprecedented in the EU.

Many refugees are hoping to be able to claim asylum in Germany.

Hassan, a 47-year-old Syrian, said he and two friends had each bought tickets to Germany for a total of 370 euros.

"They took 125 euros for each ticket to Munich or Berlin, then they stopped and forced us from station," he said.

"(They) said station is closed. They said no trains, this station is closed."

Marah, a 20 year-old girl from Aleppo, Syria, who travelled with her family, said they had bought six tickets for a RailJet train that was scheduled to leave for Vienna at 9am on Tuesday.

"They should find a solution," she told Reuters. "We are thousands here, where should we go?"

Hungary is the gateway to the EU 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.

A government spokesman told Reuters the terminus was closed in adherence with EU law, which requires anyone who wishes to travel within Europe to hold a valid passport and a Schengen visa.

Meanwhile, UNICEF has said the number of women and children fleeing through Macedonia has tripled in the past three months.

The agency said some 3,000 people are passing daily through the former Yugoslav republic - and roughly one in eight is a pregnant woman.

Citing Macedonia Interior Ministry figures, UNICEF says four in five of the migrants come from Syria.

In Morocco Spanish authorities became suspicious of a car boarding a ferry to Spain and found one man in the car's engine and another behind the vehicle's backseat.

They were both from Guinea.