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“Go back to Syria because if we catch you next time we will kill you”
The main respondent is a 22-year-old man from Syria. According to the respondent, on the 19th of December, together with a group of four other Syrian men, he left the Principovac camp at around 10 p.m. to walk to the Croatian border in Molovin. The respondent reports that after entering Croatian territory at around 2 a.m., the group was met by a dark jeep from which four men in dark uniforms wearing balaclavas and ski masks with a dog got out. Based on the description from the respondent, the uniforms could match with those usually worn by the Croatian Intervention Police.
The respondent reports that the police officers kept them in the cold for at least 3 hours, depriving them of clothes, shoes, money and their phones. The respondent recalls the police threatening them with holding their heads against the ground and repeatedly hitting them with batons and intimidating them with their dog. The respondent points out that a request for asylum was made but that the police officers told him to shut up and kept hitting them. The respondent states that the police officers wanted him to sign some untranslated papers during the three hours he was being controlled by them, but that at their expression of willingness not to sign anything, the officers hit them with batons and kicked them even more viciously. The respondent reports that at around 5 a.m. the police officers made them get up and forced them to go back towards the forest and the Serbian border, shouting in English “Go back to Syria because if we catch you next time we will kill you”. The respondent states that at the moment they got up from the ground the dog attacked and bit two people in the group.
The respondent reports that the group walked back into Serbian territory during the early lights of the morning.