• Monday, 23 December 2024

One soldier injured as Poland stops more migrants at border

One soldier injured as Poland stops more migrants at border
Another group of migrants has entered Polish territory via Belarus, according to Poland's border guard. A total of 55 migrants were detained on Sunday night and taken back to the border, a spokesperson for the agency said on Sunday. The Polish officers were pelted with stones by the migrants during the incident near the village of Czeremsza, she said. According to the information, one soldier was hit in the face and had to be medically treated by a military doctor. In total, the border guards registered 52 attempted border crossings within 24 hours. Already on Friday evening, a group of 28 migrants had crossed the border barriers. For weeks, thousands of migrants and refugees have been trying to cross the EU's external borders from Belarus to Poland or the Baltic states. The EU accuses the authoritarian Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of deliberately flying people from crisis regions into Minsk in order to smuggle them into the EU and thus destabilize the situation in the West. EU states have erected barbed wire fences to stop the migrants. According to Polish sources, another special flight took off from Minsk airport on Friday - this time to Iraq. More than 400 people left Belarus on the plane, the spokesman for the coordinator of the intelligence services, Stanislaw Zaryn, wrote on Twitter on Friday evening. Iraq's Foreign Ministry told the state news agency INA on Sunday that more than 3,500 migrants stranded in Belarus had been flown back to Iraq in recent weeks. Some 380 people had received passports after losing them in Belarus and other countries. The ministry did not say exactly what period these figures referred to.