“He looked me in the eye and fired. I couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a black mask.” Moustapha (name changed) recalls with horror his encounter with a Bulgarian policeman in early May. After six days of wandering through the Turkish forests, the fifteen-year-old Syrian boy finally managed to cross the Bulgarian border. But hope was short-lived: after a few hours of walking, the group of about twenty migrants he was travelling with was intercepted by a border guard patrol.
“They started shooting everywhere. Not in the air, but standing up.”recalls the young man, originally from Deir ez-Zor, who was shot by three non-lethal bullets while he was lying on the ground – “once, intentionally, on my leg, and twice, near my legs”. Its history, compiled by The world According to an investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), this was confirmed by his medical records.
Bulgarian border police confirm that an officer fired shots that day “a non-lethal bullet in the right leg area” of an irregular migrant, but claims that the agent acted “in self-defense”after the young man “I tried to [le] hit with a stone » and flee. The institution says it has conducted an internal investigation into the incident, the findings of which have been communicated to the military police, without specifying whether any action has been taken.
After a few days in hospital and a stint in a detention centre, Moustapha was taken to Harmanli, the country’s largest refugee reception centre. “I want to file a complaint against the police.he later told Yahia Homsi, a psychiatrist from the Bulgarian NGO Mission Wings, one of the few that works on the front line with migrants. I was shot and I don’t want to keep quiet. » However, he ended up leaving to continue his path of exile towards Europe.
In fact, silence is the most common response to abuses committed by Bulgarian security forces along its 259-kilometre land border with Turkey. And this despite the massive presence on the ground of agents from Frontex, the European border guard agency, which has been responsible for several years for helping Bulgaria to stop migrants trying to enter the European Union (EU) illegally. Their presence was intended to increase respect for fundamental rights – such as non-refoulement, the right to security or respect for human dignity – and the reporting of irregularities.
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