BUDAPEST, Hungary — Frustrated migrants demanding free passage to Germany jostled with riot police beside Budapest's main international train station Wednesday as Hungary spent a second day trying to keep thousands of asylum seekers from spilling deeper into Europe.
Scores of officers pushed back the crowd, which shouted in mixed Arabic and English to be permitted to march around Keleti train station, which has become the latest focal point for European tensions over an unrelenting flow of migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Migrants shouted at police but their remonstrations didn't turn violent.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will take a "clear and obvious message" to his meeting Thursday with EU chiefs in Brussels about migrants, a government spokesman said.
"We have to reinstate law and order at the borders of the European Union, including the border with Serbia," Zoltan Kovacs said. "Without re-establishing law and order, it will be impossible to handle the influx of migrants."
The 28-nation bloc has been at odds with itself for months on how to deal with the influx of more than 332,000migrants this year. Such front-line nations as Greece, Italy and Hungary have pleaded for more help, while Germany, which is expecting to receive an EU-leading 800,000 asylum seekers this year, has appealed for EU partners to bear more of the load.
Elsewhere on Wednesday on the migrants' long route into Europe, 13 people died when two small boats ferryingmigrants from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos capsized. Turkish media said 12 drowned, including a woman and three children, while a 13th person died later in a hospital.
The Greek coast guard also recovered the body of a man south of the island of Kalolimnos. It wasn't clear whether that body was connected to the capsized Turkish boats about 22 kilometers (14 miles) to the northeast.
In France, cross-Channel trains resumed normal service Wednesday after serious overnight disruptions triggered by reports of migrants running on the tunnel tracks and trying to climb atop trains.
Hungary's police reinforced their positions outside the Keleti terminal as the volume of migrants arriving from Serbia grows by the hour, with an estimated 3,000 already encamped near the station. Officers working with colleagues from Austria, Germany and Slovakia were searching for migrants traveling on Hungarian trains.
For its part, the Czech Republic announced Wednesday it no longer intended to prevent any Syrians who had already claimed asylum in Hungary from traveling via its territory to Germany. The Czechs previously had detained Syrian migrants, like those from other nations, for up to 42 days. This change in policy might allow Syrian migrantsto travel more freely to Germany's capital because the most direct Hungarian trains to Berlin pass through the Czech Republic.
The Hungarian government didn't explain why it permitted more than 1,000 migrants to leave Budapest by train Monday, but stopped the practice Tuesday and Wednesday, dashing the hopes of thousands more who had bought train tickets. Hungary insisted it was complying with EU rules on migration by blocking the migrants now.
Migrants "are not entitled to move freely within the European Union even after entering Hungary," Kovacs told The Associated Press. "If the migrants don't comply with the very basic rules that are in place in the European Union, there is no solution to this problem."
Kovacs also defended Hungary's 4-meter-high (13-foot-high) fence being built on the border with Serbia and the tougher migration laws it expects to enact in a couple of weeks. Those proposed laws would allow authorities to fast-track decisions on asylum requests and make it a criminal offense to cut through the fence or cross the border except at designated areas.
"We're going to thwart any effort to come to Hungary by illegal means," Kovacs said.
The Keleti clampdown has had an immediate effect in the migrants' primary target country, Germany. German police reported Wednesday that only about 50 migrants arrived on the morning trains to Munich, compared to 2,400 on Tuesday.
The Greek coast guard, meanwhile, said it had rescued 1,058 people in 28 Aegean Sea locations over the past 24 hours. More than 200,000 migrants have reached Greece this year, chiefly from neighboring Turkey, where more than 1 million live in refugee camps fueled by warfare in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Greek police also arrested six suspected smugglers in northern Greece after finding 103 migrants, including 19 children, hidden in a truck.
And in Vienna, police continued to interrogate the 30-year-old Romanian driver of a van that was discovered Tuesday containing 24 Afghans on the outskirts of the Austrian capital. Police spokesman Thomas Kleibinger said the truck's rear doors had been padlocked to keep the Afghan men, all aged 16 to 20, trapped inside, and the windows were sealed to prevent fresh air from getting inside the container. He said those inside were freed in good health because they had spent relatively little time inside.
In France, passengers aboard one Paris-to-London train said their service was suspended because migrants trying to climb aboard the train had damaged fire safety equipment. In tweets, passengers also described seeing migrantsrunning along the roofs of another train near the migrant-besieged French port of Calais.
"Just before we got to the (Channel) Tunnel it was chaos. The lights went off and the air conditioning went off. It was so hot," London resident Bridget Roussel said. "It was just disgusting. I've never experienced anything like that in my life."
In non-EU member Iceland, a populist movement is challenging the government's pledge to host just 50 Syrians, taking to social media to urge their government to do more. Some residents went online to commit to opening their homes to a war refugee while others urged the government to turn a disused army base into migrant housing.
Naval vessels from several nations patrolled Mediterranean waters off the coast of Libya on Wednesday in hopes of preventing more mass drownings of migrants jammed onto flimsy smugglers' boats. A Norwegian vessel carried about 800 rescued migrants to Cagliari on the Italian island of Sardinia.
One migrant on the Greek island of Lesbos spoke wearily about missing his family.
"They call me every day and they say to me that they miss me. And I say I miss you. But there's no way to see them," Afghan migrant Abdullah Bakhshi told the AP as he walked along a Lesbos road.
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Associated Press reporters Bela Szandelszky in Budapest; Geir Moulson in Berlin; George Jahn in Vienna, Austria; Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Elena Becatoros in Athens, Greece, contributed to this report.