At 7 am in the morning on Friday the 29th of October, a group of three individuals, one 21 year old Egyptian male; one 28 year old Egyptian male; and a 14-year-old Syrian boy, left Majdan in northern Serbia and walked through Romania for 18 kilometres to reach Hungary. They were apprehended by the Romanian police at 5pm, exactly 2 kilometres away from the Romanian-Hungarian border. There were three police officers in a dark blue uniform with a badge in yellow, blue and red on the sleeve. The vehicle they drove was a blue van with a small amount of white, possibly resembling those driven by the Jandarmeria Română.
The respondent, the 21 year old Egyptian male, recalled: “They stopped us and asked if we had any weapons like knives [and] we said no, we just want to cross the border to go to Europe.” The officers then asked us the group where they were from. At that point, the officers asked them to open their bags and took everything inside. They took their phones and smashed them, before taking money and tickets and putting them inside their pockets. They proceeded to punch and kick all of the group, including the 14 year old boy from Syria, before putting them inside their police van and driving them back to Serbia. They arrived roughly one hour later.