MINSK, February 10. /TASS/. Polish serviceman Emil Czeczko, who fled to Belarus in December, said on Thursday that 200 to 700 migrants may have been killed by Polish law enforcement officers during his service on the border with Belarus in June 2021.
"Within 10 days of my service, 200 to 700 people may have been killed there," Emil Czeczko told a news conference.
He specified that he had been part of teams of Polish border guards dealing with migrants detained at the border between June 8 to June 19, 2021. "As early as June 9, I took part in the first mass executions by shooting. Border guards ordered us to fire at the people, while aiming at our heads. After we had executed the first group, we were ordered to execute a second," he went on to say.
"This continued exactly the same way on a daily basis until June 18. I was killing groups of migrants up to 20 people. On June 19, I saw that there were obviously more people in a new pit than we had executed before," the ex-Polish serviceman noted.
Emil Czeczko, a serviceman with the Polish Army’s 16th Pomeranian Infantry Division, escaped to Belarus on December 16, 2021, and requested asylum due to his disagreement with Poland’s brutal policies towards migrants. The Polish Armed Forces accuse Czeczko of desertion, threatening to court-martial the serviceman. At the end of last year, Czeczko was sentenced for six months in prison for bullying his mother. After fleeing to Belarus, Czeczko told Belarusian investigators about the killing of over 240 refugees at the Polish-Belarusian border. In January of this year, he said he had filed an appeal with the International Criminal Court.