On September 20th, a group of 23 people arrived to Vinkovci, Croatia tired from their long journey. They were looking for a place to sleep and were walking along the road with all of their things. They noticed two taxi drivers pass them by and believed that it was them who called the police. One of the group members said, “When they see people who look like us walking through their small town, the people are scared.” However, the group kept walking and eventually found a spot to stay the night in an abandoned house. They tried their best to sleep on the broken floor.

An hour or so later, they said that they heard footsteps and the sound of a gun being cocked. Shortly after they heard, “Don’t move. Police!”. The group was then herded by five police officers, described by the respondent as one woman and four men to two large police vans. The group entered the vans and were taken to a spot along the Croatian/Serbian border. When they arrived, three police officers took control of the group and the respondent said they asked them who spoke English. The respondent said that they were all scared, and he, one of the English speakers, did not want to respond because last time he answered that he spoke English the police treated him very poorly. He shook his head ‘no’ when the police asked if he spoke English. The officer then proceeded to kick him in the leg three times. The police tried to interrogate the group for about ten minutes, the respondent said, before they made them cross the border into Serbia.