The border crossing with Croatia in the northwest of Bosnia has been closed on Wednesday after a group of migrants, who spent the night in the border crossing area, broke the first of two police cordons, news agencies reported.

Some two hundred of migrants who stayed over the past months in an improvised tent camp near the northwestern Bosnian town of Velika Kladusa, only a few kilometres away from the border with Croatia, came to the Maljevac border crossing on Tuesday, insisting that the border is open so they could continue their journey towards European Union countries.

After spending the night in open air, where they were surrounded by the police, the migrants started pressuring the cordon in the morning, and eventually broke through the first line held by border police officers, which led to the closing off of the border crossing for all traffic.

Velika Kladuša: Migranti probili policijski kordon i stigli na most koji vodi ka Hrvatskoj https://t.co/KYtY7I14tN #migranti #BiH #VelikaKladuša #Hrvatska pic.twitter.com/MrU9IJ7RmG

— ANADOLU AGENCY (BHS) (@aa_balkans) October 24, 2018

Meanwhile, a group of migrants who arrived by train late on Tuesday to the city of Bihac, about 50 kilometres away from Velika Kladusa, were left stranded in train carriages, as local police prevented them from exiting the train.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Security Minister, Dragan Mektic, said on Tuesday that the police were instructed to stop the further arrival of migrants to the Una-Sana Canton (USC), where Velika Kladusa and Bihac are located. The order followed after the local population held a series of protests demanding from the state authorities to limit the movement of migrants and solve their accommodation issue.

This northwestern Bosnian region has become a hotspot for migrants who had entered the country through its eastern borders in the attempt to reach the European Union, their final destination. Although it is hard to assess the exact number of migrants in the Una-Sana Canton, due to their constant movement, local institutions claim there are more than 10,000 of them currently in this region.

USC Police Commissioner, Mujo Koricic, told a press conference on Wednesday that a further influx of migrants in the region would mean an increased security threat.

“It is a fact that the migrants are committing numerous criminal offences on a daily basis – burglaries, rapings, robberies. We won’t give up on these measures,” Koricic said.

Over the past several months the police intervened on several occasions upon reports of clashes, burglaries, robberies, rape claims, all of them involving migrants currently located in Velika Kladusa and Bihac areas. The perpetrating migrants were subject to criminal charges, and were sent to a migrant centre near Sarajevo where they are detained and under the police control.

Samir Alagic, the Bihac railway station manager, sent out a dramatic call for help on Wednesday, saying the situation was not good at all.

“The people in four coaches of the train have been here since 12:30 am, They were protesting last night when they arrived here, there were situations when the use of force was necessary. The police officers are fair, they listen to the orders of their superiors. The situation is such that we had turned to the Security Ministry, the Interior Ministry, to help us stop the arrival of migrants and disable the sale of tickets, and the answer we always get is that they are not in charge of these things,” said Alagic, who said he never received a written order to stop the migrants and send them back to Sarajevo.

What Alagic received was a phone call from “a police officer from the town of Bosanska Krupa, where a meeting was held, and where some conclusions were reached, including the one that the entry of migrants in the USC would be barred.”

According to N1’s reporter, the buses that would transport the migrants back to Sarajevo are arriving at the railway station. Where are they going to be accommodated upon arrival in the capital is still unknown.

The migrants who used bus transportation to reach Bihac, said the police commissioner Koricic, were stopped in the town of Kljuc, about 100 kilometres away from Bihac, and sent back to Sarajevo.

“The law on internal affairs is clear. The police commissioner is the one in charge of maintaining security,” he added.

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