16 men from Morocco and Algeria started from Bihac (Bosnia and Herzegovina), crossing Croatia to Slovenia. The men’s intention was to continue to Italy where they wanted to apply for asylum. While walking through the Slovenia, a local woman detected them and called the police. Two police men arrived and asked the men about their nationality and their reasons to enter Slovenia. After that, the police took all of them to a local police station in a small town close to Ljubljana, where the men were provided a translator from Palestine.

One of the men told the translator that he wanted to apply for asylum in Slovenia and asked him to translate his wish to the police. As the man had a basic knowledge of English, he could understand that the translator was not translating his words correctly and did not state to the police his wish to stay in Slovenia. The man experienced the translator only translating correctly when he is payed a fee.

At the police station, the men were forced to sign a paper concerning their deportation before being deported to Croatia and from there to Bosnia in a car with five Croatian policemen:

“Croatian police was not behaving good, they broke my phone. Seven Croatian police officers took me to Bosnia, 43 km from Bihac, the small village called Vakuf. They [the police] broke my phone in Vakuf, they broke 6 phones in total. But good phones, they kept, like Galaxy 7 or Galaxy 8 they took, but other they destroyed, Galaxy G5 3. And after we walked back to Bihac”