Greek coast guards fire shots at refugees
Greek coast guard officers fired shots towards a boat full of refugees in the Aegean as tensions with Turkey soared over the migration crisis Monday.
Video footage showed a Greek coast guard officer, dressed in black, fire two shots from an automatic rifle into the water, close to an inflatable dinghy packed with asylum seekers.
The footage, reportedly taken at sea off the Turkish resort town of Bodrum, showed other officers apparently threatening the refugees with poles as they screamed and yelled in protest and was viewed hundreds of thousands of times on social media.
Contacted by The Daily Telegraph, a spokesman for the coast guard said: “We can’t make any comment.”
The rough tactics came as Ankara encouraged thousands of asylum seekers to head towards the Greek border.
As Greece held live-fire military exercises close to its land border with Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, threatened to send “millions” of refugees towards Europe.
Turkey complains that it has had enough of looking after the 3.7 million Syrian refugees on its soil and that it fears more are on their way as a result of savage fighting in Idlib province in northwest Syria, which has displaced around a million people.
Erdogan said that in the wake of Turkey opening up its borders last week, “hundreds of thousands have crossed, (but) soon it will reach millions.”
Those figures were a gross exaggeration — Greece said it had blocked around 10,000 refugees from crossing the border in the last few days — but they are likely to spook governments in capitals across Europe. An additional 1,300 asylum seekers reached Greece’s Aegean Islands by boat early Monday.
A young boy drowned after one of the smugglers’ boats capsized off Lesbos. It was “overturned by the people on board after it entered Greek waters” the Greek coast guard said, in an attempt to trigger a rescue operation.
The fresh wave of refugees has prompted fears of a rerun of the migration crisis of 2015, creating frustration and fury on Greek islands like Lesbos.
Locals there set up roadblocks to prevent newly arrived asylum seekers from being taken to the chronically overcrowded Moria migrant camp, where 20,000 people are living in and around a facility designed for less than 3,000.