Beaten Back at Europe’s Door

Shortly after, four men with covered faces and wearing Frontex uniforms reached them among the trees. After capturing one of the three men, they threw him to the ground and beat him violently with kicks and batons. The respondent and the other companion hide in the bushes and could have continued to escape, but the officers, while beating their friend, shouted that they would kill him if they did not come out. The two then came out from their hiding place with their hands raised, just as another vehicle with four additional officers was arriving. The respondent states: “We had our hands up and kept saying sorry, but they still threw us to the ground and started beating us – eight of them, with kicks and sticks, shouting insults probably in English.” He firmly affirms that the eight officers were “European police”, wearing dark-blue uniforms, with the European flag on the right arm and white vehicles. According to him, they were not speaking Croatian but another language he did not recognise. When showing images of different police forces, he stated with certainty that the officers he met that night matched the images of Frontex officers uniform. The three men were then stripped of their clothes, their backpacks emptied and the phones of all three destroyed. After ordering them to get dressed again, the frontex police officers loaded them into a white van and drove them back to Bosnia at high speed, taking extremely sharp turns that caused the group to repeatedly hit their heads against the van’s walls.