The UN refugee agency is urging authorities to investigate the death of a 22-year-old Syrian man reported to have drowned while trying to cross a river from Serbia to Hungary.
The UNHCR said Saturday that others in the group claimed they were pushed back into the Tisza River from Hungary. The agency is also concerned about allegations of the abuse of asylum-seekers by Hungarian officials, including excessive use of force.
Hungarian police rescued an Iraqi family, including three children, from the river Wednesday and said they had alerted their Serbian counterparts about the man in the river who was missing. His body was found Friday.
The UNHCR said Hungarian policies, including razor-wire fences on its borders with Serbia and Croatia, “leave people with little choice but to put their lives in the hands of ruthless smugglers, often with tragic consequences.”
A Norwegian tanker carrying 221 migrants who survived a shipwreck Friday is expected to arrive shortly at the Italian port of Augusta on the island of Sicily.
The Greek coast guard says Saturday the unnamed ship is also carrying the body of a migrant who drowned in Friday’s shipwreck of a smuggling boat that sank in the southern Mediterranean Sea.
The other 97 survivors of the shipwreck and the bodies of 9 other victims are being taken back to Egypt by Egyptian ships.

According to information from survivors, about 350 people boarded the smuggling boat that sank off Egypt. Egyptian authorities are still searching for those missing.
The human trafficking route from North Africa to southern Europe has claimed the lives of over 1,000 migrants in the last two weeks.
AFP reported from Vienna on Sunday, 5 June 2016 that Austria’s foreign minister has said
asylum seekers to the European Union should be held on islands rather than be allowed direct access to the continent,.
Sebastian Kurz suggested in an interview with Die Presse newspaper published Sunday that the bloc follow the “Australian example” to discourage migrants from setting out on the often perilous journey to Europe“

Hundreds of Afghan migrants backed by an Anti-racism activist group protest outside the abandoned old airport which is used as a shelter for over 3,500 refugees and migrants, in southern Athens, on Friday, May 3 , 2016.
The Australian model of course cannot be completely replicated but its principles can be applied in Europe,” the minister said, adding that he was skeptical about the impact of a recent agreement with Turkey aimed at reducing the number of migrants travelling to the continent.
Kurz added that the EU should adopt a resolution whereby those who try to enter Europe illegally lose their right to demand asylum.
Some 204,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe since January, the United Nations refugee agency said this week.
More than 2,500 people have died trying to make the journey this year – the vast majority of them on crossings between Libya and Italy – as Europe battles its worst migration crisis since World War II.
Many migrants saved from the sea are already directed to Greek islands or the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Austria, governed by a coalition of social-democrats and conservatives, welcomed some 90,000 asylum seekers last year, but since then Vienna has hardened its conditions of asylum and tried to close the migrant route from Greece to the north of Europe via the Balkans.
Source: Associated Press, AFP, 5 June 2016