Human ping pong on

Croatia yesterday diverted the flow of thousands of migrants toward Slovenia after Hungary sealed its border to block the path of the streams of refugees desperate to reach northern Europe.

Slovenia received the first buses from Croatia transporting the migrants as a much-hyped EU deal with Turkey to defuse the crisis -- which has seen some 600,000 mostly Syrian migrants enter the EU this year -- began to look shaky.

The continent's worst refugee crisis since 1945 has opened up rifts among the 28 EU member states and put unprecedented strain on the right to freedom of movement that is at the core of the bloc's values.

In the latest tragedy, 12 migrants drowned yesterday when their boat sank off the Turkish coast as they were seeking to reach Greece, Turkey's Anatolia news agency reported.

The Turkish coastguard recovered the bodies from the wooden boat, which had sailed from northwest Turkey's seaside town of Ayvalik for the Greek island of Lesbos.

Hungarian police and soldiers sealed its border with Croatia barbed wire shortly before 1:00am (2300 GMT Friday), after the last 1,500 or so migrants to arrive by train on the Croatian side trudged silently through mud over the informal Zakany crossing, and AFP correspondent said.

The two official border posts of Beremend and Letenje remain open for those with valid papers.

Croatia -- which has repeatedly slammed Budapest's migrants' policy as "unacceptable" -- reacted by diverting the flow of migrants from Hungary toward Slovenia.

Hungary's right-wing government had already sealed its frontier with non-EU neighbour Serbia in mid-September -- until then the main entry point into the EU for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

This however merely diverted the flow of people to Croatia, which began to transport the migrants by trains and buses to Hungary.

But Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic warned Friday that if Slovenia and Germany closed their borders, Croatia would be forced to do the same."

"Slovenia will not close its border unless Germany closes its border, in that case Croatia will have to do the same... There is no alternative," she told HRT state-run television.

Most migrants are trying to get to Germany, Europe's economic powerhouse, which has said it expects up to one million asylum seekers this year.

Hungary, a member of the EU and the passport-free Schengen zone, said it had decided to close the frontier with Croatia after its call for deploying EU forces to Greece's borders -- where the migrants arrive -- had failed to spark action at an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday.