“They were taken to a very bad jail that even an animal couldn’t be locked away in.”
March 2018 was the first time the respondent got sent back to Turkey. The following time, on the 10th or 11th of April, he successfully entered Greece. He and his wife came by land to a small village near Thessaloniki city.
They asked a citizen if there was a train to Thessaloniki, they said no. They were tired from the distance they had walked on their journey so they went with 30-40 asylum seekers to one of the churches to rest in the garden. The police saw them but did not say anything. In fact it was the people in the church that angrily told them to get out of the church garden.
The churchgoers also told the police they were there and as the group walked toward the main road, they were caught by the Greek police.
The people were originally very happy because they thought they were being taken to a camp but instead they were taken to a very bad jail that ‘even an animal couldn't be locked away in’, it was cold, without sheets and full of garbage.
The asylum seekers, of whom many were Iraqi or Syrian remained in jail for seven to nine hours. They asked men, women, and children to strip down naked, with everyone in the same room.
There were four to five police officers at any given time. The police officers that intercepted them outside the church were wearing police uniforms, but then in the jail and afterwards, the officers were masked in military uniforms, holding machine guns. At the jail, everyone was being hit, mobile phones were taken, and everyone was afraid of the officers.
The officers took money from the people, bought food for them but did not return the change. They tried to make it clear that they were trying to seek asylum, however this was not acknowledged.
The respondent stated that ‘they treated us very badly even after I told them I am a journalist’.
They were taken to the Turkish border by car, by ‘officers that were covered like the criminal mafia’. They were put on boats and sent to Turkey.
He said the following about his ordeal:
’I was holding my son, my wife was holding my daughter [and] without any mercy or empathy they hit both of us. Until this day my wife and my daughter have psychological issues and they have great fear, they see psychiatrists, [and] I have medical report[s] for this. We thought they were going to kill us, I told my story to Alexandria camp staff, the ministry and DRC organization. . . nothing happened. Our story happened in March 2018.’