Poland on Friday (19) accused the Belarus government of transporting hundreds of migrants back to the border between the two countries, a day after the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko announced that the camps in the region had been emptied.
Polish Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska said that on Thursday night (18), just hours after the closing of the makeshift camps, Belarusian authorities were already transporting hundreds of people back to the area and forcing them to return. the ones trying to cross the border in the dark.
“(Belarusians) They were bringing more migrants to the place where there was a forced crossing attempt,” Michalska said, according to Reuters. “At first there were a hundred people, but later the Belarusian side brought in more people in trucks. Then there were 500 people.”
Thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East and Central Asia, were camped in the border region between Poland and Belarus. The crisis was seen by Warsaw and the European Union as an action orchestrated by Lukashenko to destabilize the region, in response to sanctions imposed on his regime by Western countries.
In an interview with the BBC, the dictator denied having planned the crisis, but said that Belarusian guards may have helped migrants trying to cross over to the Polish side. “I think it’s absolutely possible. We are Slavs. We have hearts. Our troops know that migrants are going to Germany. Maybe someone helped them. I’m not even going to investigate this”, he declared.
On Thursday, hundreds of Iraqis traveled back to Iraq from Minsk airport on the first repatriation flight from Belarus since August.
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