The French magazine "L'Obs" said that disturbing videos and photos published by the "Lighthouse Reports" group and many European media recently revealed that dozens of immigrants were illegally detained in a cage that resembles a cattle shed on the border with Turkey, which the Bulgarian authorities turned it into. to a dungeon.
The magazine recounted, in a report by Mary Faton, the details of a clip showing the fall of a wounded Syrian youth after being targeted by members of the Bulgarian security forces and border guards with a bullet that penetrated his lung. The European Frontex is responsible for controlling the external borders of the Schengen area.
Light House Reports, a human rights organization concerned with documenting violations against immigrants, quoted a Syrian who was among these immigrants as saying: "We were insulted, robbed and beaten. We had a 15-year-old boy and a woman with us. In this cage, we asked for water and food." They gave us nothing, they unleashed the dogs on us inside and beat us.” Another Afghan national said, “After several hours, they took us back to the Turkish border with trucks.”
The European Court of Human Rights had condemned Bulgaria, which in 2022 - according to its Ministry of Interior - arrested about 11,000 people, after entering the country illegally, due to the forced illegal return of asylum-seekers.
European Union funds
This country, a member of the European Union since 2007 - according to the magazine - has increased the checkpoints in the hope of joining the Schengen area, but Austria and the Netherlands objected to its entry on the grounds that it endangers the Union because it is a crossing through which thousands of illegal immigrants can enter.
In this context, Bulgaria built 165 km of fences on the border with Turkey - as the French magazine report says - and Hungary built a 175 km barrier along its border with Serbia, and then French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius condemned it, saying, "Hungary is part of Europe. Europe has Values, and erecting walls for people as they do for animals does not respect these values.”
Although France took the initiative to criticize this act, it was one of the first countries to build a fence to prevent migrants from reaching the port of Calais and the Channel Tunnel, to follow the "walls of shame", where barbed wire was extended in Greece, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
Although the European Commission refused to finance the construction of "anti-immigrant walls" at the borders of the countries that requested it, it funds the border police, as Bulgaria, Croatia and Hungary each received hundreds of millions of euros, so that Sofia used about 170 thousand euros of European Union funds to renew the center Serides police in which the illegal cage-like barn is located.