On August 18th. 2018, the interviewee and his friend walked from Velika Kladuša (BiH) to inland Croatian. Soon after they crossed the border to Croatia, they were caught by 2 Croatian police officers, wearing blue shirts. The police acted politely, questioned the respondent and his friends about their intentions in Croatia and offered them water. The officers called 5 other police men, wearing black clothes and gloves, who directly pushed the respondent and his friend to Bosnia.

The respondent asked these officers whether he could claim asylum in Croatia, but he got a negative response: “No asylum for migrants, only for refugees”, and they refused to take the young men to a police station to claim asylum in Croatia. According to the respondent these 5 officers destroyed their possessions, robbed them, and physically attacked them during their deportation back to Bosnia:

This group of police took all our phones and a power bank, charger, watch, everything we had, put it under the wheel, and drove over it, back and front. Afterwards, they took us inside the car and drove us to the forest where they were beating us. It was night, and they took us like 30 meters inside of that forest. There was no light, and they were beating us with the sticks. We could not see their face properly or from where they were coming to beat us. I was just covering
my face to protect myself… One police man was laughing, the other was taking videos and pictures, joking. I asked him to kill me, but he said: I am not going to kill you but beat you.

The respondent further said to me that the police stole his 500 euros. According to him, the whole incident of pushback when the police robbed them and attacked them took about one hour. Afterwards, the police took the men to a place about 2 km far away from the official border check-point in Velika Kladuša where there was a river. The police pushed him and his friend into the river and told them to go back to Bosnia.