The President of the Czech Republic has warned that Muslim migrants will “respect Sharia instead of Czech laws,” possibly stoning women, and saying that they could increase the practice of veiling, “depriving” the nation of female beauty.

Outspoken left-wing Czech President Milos Zeman, 72, was asked if he thought new migrants from the Middle East would respect Czech laws of Friday: “Of course not,” he replied.

“Unfaithful women will be stoned and thieves will have their hands cut off, and we’ll be deprived of women’s beauty, because they’ll be covered from head to toe

“This would obviously be an advantage for some women, but they’re few and far between,” he added during a casual chat with workers in a butchers shop in the eastern village of Lechotice, AFP reports.

He made the comments on the same day that hundreds of migrants traveled from Croatia to Slovakia in just 24 hours, following Hungary closing it’s boarder with Croatia.

The Croatian Interior Minister, Ranko Ostojic, said that buses carrying more than 600 migrants have already arrived at the border crossings of Gruskovje and Petisovci.

Slovenia has now stopped all trains from Croatia to stem the relentless flow of migrants across the Balkans route on to Austria and the Czech Republic.

Czech police said on Friday that they had intercepted 7,201 migrants in the first nine months of this year alone, more than double the number during the same period in 2014.

President Zeman is the leader of the left wing Czech Social Democratic Party and is well know for his controversial remarks. In August, after dozens of migrants tried to flee a detention centre, the president told them: “No one invited you here… You must respect our rules.”

The Czech Republic is part of the Eastern, so-called Visegrad group of countries – along with Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – who strongly resisted the introduction of the EU’s forced migration quotas in September.