Member of the European Parliament from Poland: There may be mass graves of migrants in the forests on the Polish-Belarusian border
Nearly 300 people have disappeared on the border between Belarus and Poland, and their bodies may be in secretly created mass graves. This was stated by Member of the European Parliament from Poland Janina Ochojska.
The Polish authorities denied this information and threatened the MEP with “legal consequences,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I think there are many more victims on this border. They are either in a mass grave... because I wouldn’t be surprised if at a time when access to the border was closed, the bodies were simply collected so that there would be no evidence,” Okhoiskaya said on the TOK FM radio station.
Okhoyskaya said that activists “scoured the forests and recently found the body of a Yemeni man who had been lying there for a very long time.” “I assume that there are still bodies in the forest, but perhaps some of them were simply removed,” she added, noting that the fate of almost 300 migrants who managed to get from Belarus to Poland is still unknown.
The MEP suggested that Polish foresters were simply “removing” the bodies of migrants from the forests. “Why do I think this? There was a time when foresters from all over the country were brought to the border. For what? After all, you can’t help the forest in difficult times. But they were called for something,” she said.
“This is not an accusation, this is an assumption about what could have happened, and if I were the government that we have now, I would do the same thing to hide the evidence,” Okhoiskaya said.
The politician’s statement was commented on by Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland Maciej Wonsik. “Okhoiskaya on TOK FM claims that there are mass graves of migrants in the forests near the Belarusian border. The corpses were placed in mass graves by foresters. Probably, tomorrow fragments of the program will be reproduced by the Belarusian media,” the official noted.
In turn, the press secretary of the State Forestry Office of Poland, Michal Chowsky, wrote on Twitter:
“Member of the European Parliament Janina Ochojska accused foresters of hiding several hundred bodies of refugees in a mass forest grave in Bialowieza. This is an extremely vile slander. State forests will take all legally available measures to ensure that spitting on a forester’s uniform does not go unpunished.”
Yanina Ochojska has repeatedly sharply criticized the Polish services, which for almost two years did not allow migrants to cross the Polish-Belarusian border. So, in January last year, she compared the actions of the Polish Border Guard with the actions of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann.
And recently Yanina Ochojskaya organized an exhibition at the European Parliament called “PUSHBACKS ARE ILLEGAL. HELP IS LEGAL" about the fate of illegal immigrants on the Polish-Belarusian border. The invitation to the exhibition said it was about “violating the rights of migrants by pushing them across borders, and intimidating those trying to save lives at the border.”
Как reported PolitNavigator, the Polish military is placing anti-tank barriers on the roads leading to Belarus.
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