Three children are recovering in hospital in Austria after being rescued from a minivan containing 26 migrants.
Police said the severely dehydrated children would not have lasted much longer in the cramped vehicle.
The minivan was stopped in Braunau district on Friday and the Romanian driver was arrested after a chase.
Separately,
four men appeared in court in Hungary following the discovery last week
of another truck in Austria containing the bodies of 71 people.
The
three Bulgarians and an Afghan, who were arrested in Hungary, were
remanded in custody until 29 September. Austria is expected to seek
their extradition.
The latest incident - which was not reported
until Saturday - happened near the small town of St Peter am Hart, close
to the German border.
A
police spokesman told the BBC that the children were crammed in the
back of the minivan along with the other migrants, said to be from
Syria, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
He said the children - aged
about five or six - were critically ill and almost unconscious.
Officials said on Saturday that their lives were no longer in danger but
they are still in hospital.
Police said they had tried to stop
the vehicle and gave chase when it drove off at speed. The migrants said
they were hoping to reach Germany.
Image caption
In Hungary, the four handcuffed suspects arrived in black police vehicles
The discovery of the 71 bodies in the lorry left on a roadside near the Hungarian border last week led to an outcry.
Officials
said the 59 men, eight women and four children - thought to be mainly
Syrians - had probably died of suffocation two days earlier.
Austrian
police were alerted when a road worker saw liquid seeping from the
vehicle and the badly decomposing bodies were found inside.
Prosecutors
say the four suspects who appeared at court in the city of Kecskemet on
Saturday are believed to be low-ranking members of a
Bulgarian-Hungarian people-trafficking gang.
So far this month more than 40,000 asylum seekers, the majority of them Syrian, have arrived in Hungary via the Balkans.
Hungary
said on Saturday it had completed a 175km (108 mile) razor-wire barrier
- aimed at stemming the flow of migrants - along its border with non-EU
member Serbia.
It plans to replace the barrier with a 4m-high (13ft) fence.
Many
migrants fall prey to smugglers who wait near the refugee camps,
offering to take them at a high price on to western Europe, the BBC's
Nick Thorpe in Hungary says.
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