"You are Turkish, we are not going to hit you. We just hit people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India."

The respondent is a 25-year-old Turkish man. The respondent was part of a transit group that consisted of two other Turkish men, aged 18 and 26. The transit group were pushed back from Croatia to Bosnia around the 19th of June. The respondent had trouble remembering the exact date of the pushback, but believed it was likely around the 19th of June. 

At 6 pm, the three Turkish men were walking along the road in Jagrovac (at approximately 45.2168647, 15.7452204) looking for a market where they could buy food and water, when a car drove by and stopped them. It was a brand new white jeep, with Croatian writing on the side, though the respondent couldn’t remember what it said. The respondent described the driver as wearing a light blue shirt with a jacket. When shown images of Croatian police, the respondent recognised that it was a border police officer.

The respondent described that the officer asked the transit group to put their phones on top of the car, asked if they had any weapons, patted them down, checked the respondent’s bag, and checked their IDs. The respondent showed them his Turkish passport, and the police officer took a photo of it. He then called another officer and waited for him. 

While waiting for the second officer, the respondent asked the police officer what was going to happen and if they were going to be brought to a police station. The officer allegedly responded: 

‘To be honest, I don’t know. My job is just to catch someone. If I catch someone, I report it to other officers, and my job is done.’ 

The respondent reportedly told him that he heard Croatian police officers used to break phones and hit people on the move. The police officer then responded:

‘You are Turkish, we are not going to hit you. We just hit people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

The respondent then described, he was told by the police that because they didn’t run away, nothing would happen to the transit group. The respondent reported that the officer advised him:

‘Just do whatever the other officer says. If he says go to Bosnia, go to Bosnia. Then he will be nice.'

Nonetheless, the respondent described the second officer as ‘not nice’.

After the above-mentioned conversation, the respondent explained to the officer that his friend had left his backpack in the forest, and asked if they could take him back to get it. The backpack had all of his friends' money, as well as two of their passports inside. The officer refused to bring them back and allegedly told them to ask the second officer. 

The second officer arrived in a white police van shortly after, and he also refused to bring them back. The respondent could not recall the uniform that this officer was wearing, but he believed he was also a border police officer.

The transit group was handed over to the second officer and placed inside the van. Then they were driven around for about an hour and a half. The respondent described the car as extremely hot. He thought the officer was driving for longer than necessary just to make them suffer. They asked for air conditioning or for the windows to be opened, but the officer refused. The respondent described it as ‘torture’.

 Eventually, the officer pulled over in a remote area in Šiljkovača, Croatia, near the border with Bosnia (coordinates: 45.1358311, 15.7790905). The transit group got out of the van, and the officer told the group to walk to Bosnia. He said:

‘Don’t come back. If you come back again, we will hurt you.'