Border guards say another dead migrant found near Polish border

February 6, BPN. On February 4, Belarusian border guards found the body of a foreigner, “presumably an Iraqi national born in 2001,” five meters from the Polish border fence, the State Border Committee’s press office reported.

“The man’s body was in the immediate vicinity of the water pass in the Polish fence,” reads its statement released on February 6. Border authorities assume that the body was pushed to the Belarusian side through the technological opening that could be opened from the Polish side.

Border authorities say that they found 12 dead migrants at the Belarusian-Polish border since the start of the migration crisis, with eight deaths recorded in 2022 alone.

The migration crisis at the Belarusian-EU border dates back to the spring of 2021. It escalated on November 8, 2021 when thousands of migrants set up a camp near the Polish border.

The Baltic states and Poland accused Belarusian border guards of herding migrants across the border. They charged Minsk with engineering the migration crisis that they see as a hybrid attack on the European Union.

Migration figures had dropped significantly by the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but have risen more recently.