Slovenia to slow migrant flow over fears of bottleneck

Slovenia warned Sunday it would be forced to slow down the rapidly rising influx of migrants arriving from Croatia and Serbia after Hungary shut its borders, raising fears of a human bottleneck.

 The government in Ljubljana said it had refused on Sunday to allow in a train carrying 1,800 migrants from Croatia, after more than 3,000 people surged into the tiny EU member state the day before.

 Around half of the migrants have already continued their journey to neighbouring Austria, another key transit country for tens of thousands of migrants and refugees, mostly from Syria, seeking to reach Germany.

 Slovenia stressed it would remain firm in its decision to handle up to 2,500 a day to help ease pressure on both its own and Austria's borders.

 "Croatia has demanded that we manage 5,000 migrants per day while Austria has told us that, due to the pressure they are under, they can't handle more than 1,500 people a day," interior ministry spokesman Bostjan Sefic said at a press conference in Ljubljana.

 Pressure on Croatia increased after Hungary closed its frontier to migrants with razor wire early Saturday in a bid to block the path of streams of refugees fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.