WARSAW, December 20. /TASS/. The details of Polish law enforcement officers killing volunteers on the border with Belarus, told by a Polish service member who had fled to Belarus, are implausible, Poland’s Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wasik told Polish Radio on Monday.
"He claims that the Border Guard and the Polish Army are killing volunteers and he witnessed two incidents of that kind. However, no humanitarian organization has reported any missing volunteers who sought to provide aid to migrants," the official said.
Earlier, the Belarusian State Border Committee said that on December 16, its officers had stopped a man born in 1996 near the border with Poland. The man claimed to be a service member from the 11th Masurian Artillery Regiment of Poland’s 16th Pomeranian Mechanized Division named after King Casimir, whose units had been deployed to protect the border with Belarus for the duration of the state of emergency declared in the country’s border areas. The service member requested political asylum in Belarus because of his disagreement with Poland’s policy towards the current migration crisis and its inhuman treatment of refugees, the Belarusian State Border Committee noted.
Tensions sparked by migrants seeking to enter Poland, Lithuania and Latvia via Belarus exploded on November 8. Several thousand refugees arrived on the Belarusian-Polish border, some of them trying to cross through it by cutting down barbed-wire fences. Poland laid the blame for the crisis on the Belarusian authorities, saying that they were deliberately bringing thousands of migrants into their country in order to send them across the border and destabilize the situation. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, in turn, blamed the situation on the West whose actions forced people to flee their war-torn homelands.