Macedonia has closed its border with Greece to migrants, police in Skopje said Wednesday, January 20, blocking the path of hundreds trying to reach northern Europe, AFP reports.
"The border is closed," a senior Macedonian police official told AFP, while a police spokesman in northern Greece said it had been closed since Tuesday evening, leaving about 600 migrants stranded at the frontier.
There were contradictory reasons for the move, which the Macedonian official said was "temporary," along the so-called Balkans route that migrants follow in a bid to reach European Union territory, AFP says.
The Skopje police official said the move stemmed from problems with Slovenian trains that had disrupted the flow of migrants, but the Slovenian rail company Slovenske Zeleznice (SZ) insisted they were running as normal.
"Macedonia temporarily closed the border upon the request received from Slovenia. The reason is a defect on the railroad (in Slovenia) and migrants trying to enter Macedonia could not continue their journey," the official said.
However, while the SZ website reported Wednesday that technical problems had disrupted traffic at the crossing with Croatia and trains were being replaced temporarily with buses, an SZ spokesman told Slovenian news agency STA that migrants "have been travelling undisturbed so far."
Both Serbia and Croatia meanwhile announced that they would only allow migrants to pass through if they were specifically seeking asylum in Austria or Germany, according to AFP.
