Belarusian border guards beat three migrants, including two Syrians

Polish border guards found three migrants, including two Syrians, who had been subjected to violence by Belarusian border guards in the Pruzhany town near the Polish border, local media reported said on Friday.

 The migrants reported that the Belarusian-Polish authorities detained them after requesting asylum, and members of the security forces began kicking and beating them with batons.

The refugees confirmed to investigators that they intended to head to Germany via Poland, but the Poles detained them, confiscated their money and personal belongings, and then beat them with batons and machine gun butts. The exhausted people were then forced out through the animal gate into Belarus.

According to the Investigative Committee, three migrants from Syria and Afghanistan were found in the Pruzhany area near the Polish border. They were unable to move independently and sought water and medical care.

150,000 attempts to cross into Poland

A recent analysis by Deutsche Welle shows that migrants have made nearly 150,000 attempts to cross into Poland, Lithuania or Latvia from Belarus since 2021. Nearly 100,000 of those crossing attempts were recorded at Poland's borders, followed by Latvia with about 25,000 and Lithuania with 22. ,000 attempts.

According to the Migrant News website concerned with immigration and asylum affairs, the three member states of the European Union and NATO spent hundreds of millions of euros to secure their borders with a barbed wire fence equipped with thousands of cameras and motion sensors. These countries also increased the number of soldiers and border guards stationed on their borders with Belarus.

Western countries have long accused the Belarusian leadership of trying to destabilize the European Union by smuggling migrants across the Polish border.

Belarus' Governor Lukashenko has repeatedly rejected these accusations.

Since August 2021, large numbers of migrants, most of them from the Middle East, have begun crossing into the European Union from Belarus, leaving thousands stranded in border areas for several months and causing a humanitarian crisis, with some of them exposed to extremely cold weather conditions for weeks.