Syrian refugee children disappear from Austrian hospital

Austrian police say that three Syrian children and their families who were rescued from a minivan containing 26 asylum seekers have disappeared from the hospital were they were receiving treatment.

The children – two girls and a boy aged between one and five years old - were rushed to a hospital in Braunau am Inn on Friday suffering from severe dehydration. They were reportedly crammed in the back of the minivan along with other people from Syria, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

Austrian police found them critically ill and almost unconscious, when they stopped the minivan in Braunau, on the country's border with Germany, and arrested the van’s Romanian driver. 

Austrian authorities now believe they may have tried to cross the border into Germany, rather than face deportation back to Hungary.

Their discovery came a day after 71 bodies were found on a dumped lorry in Austria near the Hungarian border. Hungarian police said on Sunday that they have arrested a fifth man, a Bulgarian, over their deaths. Authorities believe the men – four Bulgarians and an Afghan -are low-level members of a human trafficking gang.

Officials said the 59 men, eight women and four children - thought to be mainly Syrians - had probably died of suffocation two days prior to the find.

It is the latest in a series of tragedies, as more and more people seek asylum in Europe – with a record 107,500 such people crossing the EU borders last month.

Meanwhile, Germany, France and the UK called on Sunday for an urgent meeting of EU interior and justice ministers to "find concrete steps" to solve the issue.

The call follows criticism from French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius about how Eastern European countries were dealing with the crisis.

"When I see a certain number of European countries, particularly in the east, who do not accept quotas [of asylum seekers], I find it scandalous," he told French radio station Europe 1.

He pointed specifically to Hungary's 175km (108 mile) razor-wire barrier along its border with Serbia, saying it "did not respect Europe's common values".

Hungary plans to replace the barrier, which was completed on Saturday, with a 4m-high fence to "provide a defence against illegal border-crossers".