According to a report from the Novo Mesto Police Department, the 14 migrants were apprehended in the areas of Preloka in the Črnomelj municipality and Vidošiči in the neighbouring Metlika municipality.
All 14 of them have applied for asylum and will be taken to the asylum centre once police procedures have been completed. Nine of them are citizens of Algeria, four are from Pakistan and one from Tunisia.
Further upstream a body was recovered from the Kolpa on Sunday afternoon after a call from a local who spotted the body. A post mortem has been ordered to establish the cause of death, but an initial medical examination did not find signs of violence on the body, the report said.
While the police report did not connect the incident with migrants, there have been reports recently of migrants drowning in the Kolpa as the numbers trying to cross the river rose.
The Novo Mesto Police recorded 196 migrants crossing illegally into Slovenia across the Kolpa between September 2017 and February 2018, which compares to 46 between January and August 2017.
So far this year the Novo Mesto Police Department has registered 346 foreigners crossing the border illegally, most of them in the Bela Krajina region, up from only 40 in the same period last year.
Most of the illegal migrants were citizens of Algeria, followed by those from Morocco and Pakistan.
Data by the General Police Administration show the total number of illegal border crossings reaching 955 by 22 April this year, which is a 246% increase on the same period last year.
Up the most are the numbers for citizens of Algeria, Pakistan, Syria, Morocco and Croatia.
The number of migrants filing for asylum has meanwhile increased in the first three months of the year from 192 in 2017 to 524 this year.
Meanwhile, the Novo Mesto department's press service added that Novo Mesto Police officers had handled two cases of migrants drowning in the Kolpa this year, on 9 and 10 April, while Croatian counterparts handled another case.
"The identity of the body found yesterday in the Kolpa is yet to be established and we cannot claim it was a person trying to enter illegally into Slovenia," spokesperson Alenka Drenik told the STA.
She also noted that local voluntary firefighters had been called in every time that suspicions arose of the possibility of migrants drowning or being carried away be the river, and that they had searched the river bed and the boarder area with the help of boats and local divers for potential victims.
