While the government said it was still investigating the cause, police at the scene told The Associated Press that migrants had set a stack of UNHCR-supplied blankets deliberately on fire to protest conditions in the camp on the outskirts of Brezice. Sometimes in the pitch dark, at other times aided by light from a police helicopter's searchlight, more than 1,000 souls strode chest-deep into the muddy waters on the Croat side and struggled up the muddy embankment into Slovenia. More than 21,500 people have crossed that frontier in the five days since Hungary — the previous favored EU entry point for migrants crossing the Balkans — closed its borders with Croatia and forced the human tide further west into Slovenia. Lawmakers passed an emergency bill permitting Slovenia's military to operate more freely along the border, and more than 200 troops were deployed Wednesday in armored personnel carriers at several crossing points and camps. Slovenia's interior secretary of state, Bostjan Sefic, told reporters in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana that troops would have greater freedom to tackle crowd-control tasks on their own, because the country didn't have enough police for the job. For months, a steady stream of asylum seekers has traveled from EU member Greece north through non-EU members Macedonia and Serbia to reach what the travelers hope will be an easy entry point to the passport-free EU zone.
 |
| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.sfgate.com |
