Warsaw: A four-year-old Iraqi migrant girl has gone missing in a snowy forest after being separated from her parents in a scuffle with Polish border guards, humanitarian groups say they are trying to help find the child in the border area. have reached. pressured to
Poland has closed the region along its border with Belarus to outsiders as it sought to keep out the thousands of people from the Middle East and Africa who have traveled to Belarus hoping to cross into EU territory. have traveled. had traveled.
The European Union accused Belarus of blowing them into the country and then pushing them to cross into Poland and – to a lesser extent – in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Minsk over human rights abuses in Lithuania and Latvia.
Humanitarian groups said on Wednesday that an Iraqi girl named Eileen was separated from her parents on Monday night after she violated the border in Poland.
They said the parents handed their daughter over to another adult migrant after Polish border guards pushed her back to Belarus, and saw the girl last seen with a man accompanying her near the Polish frontier village of Novi Dvor. gone.
“This girl is probably either already dead or will die very soon. The most dramatic thing is that if it were a Polish child, the whole country would be looking for him, ”said Kasia Koskiza of the Families Without Borders charity group.
“The search should have started as soon as they came to know about the situation… Chances are, the night is starting again and the temperature will start dropping, so if we want to save him, it has to be done immediately. ,
Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska said soldiers began a search for the girl as soon as she was reported missing on Tuesday afternoon.
“Additional patrolling was directed to the area where the girl was supposed to be. We also searched in the air by helicopter, but we could not find any.
Activists said the efforts of the authorities were insufficient.
Under new rules introduced after a state of emergency in the migrant crisis that ended last week, workers who are not residents of the border area cannot enter any search for help.
International organizations have accused Poland’s right-wing nationalist government of violating humanitarian standards by bringing some migrants back to Belarus, which Warsaw denies.
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