On August 29th, 2017, a group of four people from Afghanistan, two of them minors, were apprehended by the Croatian police in Zagreb. They were taken to the police station, where they were kept for 9-10 hours.
The Police officers collected their mobile phones and put handcuffs on their hands. The people-on-the-move asked for food and water, as they were very hungry, but were only given water.
One person had severe shoulder pain from the injury he got while jumping off the train. He asked for a doctor. The doctor checked the shoulder and said everything was okay. The person later had to visit a doctor in Serbia, and still could not move the shoulder and was taking pain-killers at the time of our interview.
When the people-on-the-move asked for asylum, the officer said he couldn’t process this because his boss was currently away. When filling in the document, they were asked to leave the space for age blank – so that the minors could be registered as being over 18, as our interviewee reckoned.
The people were brought to the Croatian-Serbian border at the railway tracks near Tovarnik, on the Croatian side, in three white vans. There were about 15 Croatian police officers in green and violet uniforms. When leaving the van, the police opened the backdoor of the van, queued people up in two lines and told them to run. While the group was running across the border they hit them with batons. Our interviewee was hit twice in the back, twice on the butt. Also the minors were hit.