Riot police used ‘lethal’ tear gas shells
Athens denies report on migrant skirmish
ATHENS: Greek riot police deployed to the border with Turkey to hold back thousands of migrants trying to push through may be using potentially lethal tear gas, a report said yesterday.
Investigative website Bellingcat said expended gas canisters with pointed tips had been found in the vicinity of protests by asylum-seekers at the border between Greece and Turkey.
It also posted a picture apparently showing a helmeted man standing behind Greek riot police, loading such a canister into a tear-gas launcher.
“Unlike normal tear gas rounds, which have a limited range and would be unlikely to cause significant injuries, these long-range munitions ... usually have significantly more kinetic energy than normal tear gas rounds,” the website said.
“The combination of greater kinetic energy and a pointed tip make this kind of round potentially lethal to anyone hit by it,” it said, adding that similar rounds have caused “serious injury or death of scores of protesters in Iraq”.
Turkey has already accused Greece of firing live rounds against migrants, claiming injuries and deaths among those on the Turkish side of the border.
Athens has dismissed the allegation as “fake news”.
Speaking in Brussels on Wednesday, Greece’s deputy migration minister Georgios Koumoutsakos denied that live rounds had been fired near migrants, saying it was just “probably some rubber bullets”.
In an effort to curb the influx, which began after Ankara said last week it would no longer stop refugees from entering Europe, Athens has suspended asylum procedures and reinforced its border forces.
The Greek government said border guards had prevented nearly 7,000 attempted entries over the last 24 hours, and nearly 35,000 over the last five days.
Among 24 people arrested since Wednesday, most were from Afghanistan and Pakistan, it said.
Turkey deployed 1,000 special police forces along its border with Greece yesterday to halt the pushback of migrants towards its territory, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said, adding that 164 migrants had been wounded by Greek authorities.
Mr Soylu’s comments come amid a war of words between Ankara and Athens following Turkey’s decision to no longer abide by a 2016 deal with the European Union to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for billions of euros in aid.
Since then, thousands of migrants have rushed to the Turkish border with Greece in hopes of crossing into Europe. Ankara has accused Greek authorities of shooting dead and injuring migrants near the border. Athens has rejected this, saying Turkish police were helping migrants cross the border illegally.
Speaking to reporters in the northwestern border province of Edirne, Mr Soylu said Greek police had wounded the scores of migrants trying to cross the border.
“They wounded 164 people. They tried to push 4,900 people back to Turkey,” he said. “We are deploying 1,000 special force police to the border system ... to prevent the push-back.”
Turkey, locked in a military conflict with Moscow and Damascus in northwest Syria, hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees and has said it cannot handle more. It wants the EU to more forcefully back its efforts in Syria and deliver more funds to care for the nearly one million displaced there.
President Tayyip Erdogan met with EU officials on Wednesday to discuss developments in Syria and the migrants flooding the European borders. Mr Erdogan’s spokesman later said “no concrete proposition” on the migrants was made at the talks.