“We did not know what to do, where to go. We were screaming for help.”
The respondent tried to cross the border three times. The first two times, he was caught by the Turkish police. On the third time, he was caught by Greek police. The fourth time he crossed was in April 2018, around the 7th or 10th of April. He went past the river and walked for 3 to 4 hours. They were spotted by a group of people who said ‘come come to us’ and that they would make them a coffee. The village they were in was called Orestiada. There were more than 50 people with them.
In the village, there was a man, he told them to go to a place where they could take the bus from. They heard that if they got 15km inside of Greece they would not be sent back to Turkey. They took the bus and went to Alexandroupoli. It took one hour. Then they went to the train station to buy tickets.
There was a man with a motorbike who came to them. He asked them if they had a kharti. They said no. Then he said you can come with us and we will make you a kharti. After that you can take a train to Thessaloniki. He told them that. And there were 2 people, who took them to the police station. They were wearing dark blue police uniform, and had guns. The place looked like a police station. One walked in the front, the other behind them.
When they arrived at the police station, everything they had been told about the coffee and so on was a lie. They checked all of the peoples bodies, police men checked the men and police women for the women. They took all the phones. They brought a bag and put all the phones inside. After that they took the bags away.
Cars arrived and the police put them inside, and threw the bags inside with them, without the phones. A big truck, a military car came. It was really dirty, there were no chairs. They were treated like sheep, told to go inside. It was a closed truck with only a very small window, you could not see what was going on. They did not know where they were going. They then realized that they had been taken to the Turkish border. They were taken to a place that looked not like a camp but like a jail. It was a detention center. He saw other Pakistani people there. They put them in the square, told them to sit down and to be silent. They checked them again but this time they did a really through check, checking everything, even their socks.
They were checking to see if anyone had hidden anything, like a phone. They took everything, the food, the water, they took it out of their bags. They waited in the yard for four hours. After that, three men wearing masks came. They came by a small car. They asked them to get back into the big car and followed behind them in the small car. They drove around for a while and when the sun came down they stopped somewhere at the river.
They asked them to get out of the car, they were pressuring them, pushing them, treating them in a bad way. They were pushing everyone, including pregnant women. When her husband tried to stop them, they started hitting him with sticks.
“Hajde go go – Hajde go go!” – “Hajde, Malaka!” - they were saying. They were treating them like ‘sheep’. ‘We did not know what to do, where to go. We were screaming for help’.