SOKOLKA: The Polish army on Thursday said it had detained a group of about 100 migrants who crossed the Belarus border during the night, accusing Belarusian forces of leading the operation.
The incident came as Belarus, which has said it wants to defuse the crisis, prepared a first repatriation flight for migrants to Iraq that will have between 200 and 300 people on board.
Thousands of migrants, mainly from the Middle East, are camped out or staying close to the Poland-Belarus border in dire conditions aiming to cross into the European Union, in a crisis that began over the summer.
The EU says Belarus engineered the crisis in retaliation for sanctions on the ex-Soviet country. Minsk and its main ally Russia have rejected the charges and have criticized the EU for not taking in the migrants seeking to cross over.
In the latest border incident, the Polish defense ministry said that Belarusian forces had first carried out reconnaissance and “most likely” damaged the barbed wire fence along the border.
“Then the Belarusians forced the migrants to throw stones at Polish soldiers to distract them. The attempt to cross the border took place several hundred meters away,” it said.
“A group of about 100 migrants was detained,” it said, adding that the incident happened near the village of Dubicze Cerkiewne.
“Belarusian special forces led yesterday’s attack,” it said.
Video footage released by the defense ministry appeared to show Polish soldiers surrounding a large group of migrants crouched down in a wooded area at night next to some barbed wire.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled with an iron fist for nearly three decades, has spoken to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the crisis twice in recent days.
Lukashenko’s press service on Wednesday said the Belarus leader and Merkel “agreed that the problem as a whole will be brought up to the level of Belarus and the EU.
“Relevant officials, to be determined from both sides, will immediately start negotiations to resolve the existing problems,” it said.
Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said the German leader had “underlined the need to provide humanitarian care and return options for the affected people.”
An EU spokesman said there were “technical talks” and urged Minsk to grant humanitarian access to the border area.
Aid groups say at least 11 migrants have died since the crisis began in the summer.
They have called for a de-escalation and a humanitarian response to the problem.
Poland estimates there are between 3,000 and 4,000 migrants along the entire border, with the largest group staying close to the shut down Bruzgi-Kuznica border crossing.
The Belarusian Red Cross says around 1,000 migrants are staying in a warehouse near that crossing and 800 more are camped nearby.
Belarus said it was preparing a voluntary repatriation flight that is planned to take off from Minsk at around 1045 GMT on Thursday and will fly first to Irbil and then to Baghdad.
Several airlines have also said they are trying to stop would-be migrants from traveling to Belarus in the first place.
But officials have warned that the crisis may take time to defuse.
Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said Wednesday: “We have to prepare for the fact that the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border will not be resolved quickly.
“We have to prepare for months or even years,” he told Poland’s Radio Jedynka.
In an interview with AFP, Fabrice Leggeri, the head of the EU border agency Frontex, also said that the EU should prepare for more “hybrid” migrant crises engineered for political ends.
“We have to prepare ourselves for situations like this which can arise quite quickly,” he said, comparing the current standoff to one on the Greece-Turkey border last year.
Poland detains 100 migrants at border, accuses Belarus
https://arab.news/8z4jc
Poland detains 100 migrants at border, accuses Belarus
- The EU says Belarus engineered the crisis in retaliation for sanctions on the ex-Soviet country
- Poland estimates there are between 3,000 and 4,000 migrants along the entire border
Justice Department says it’s releasing 3 million pages from its Jeffrey Epstein files
- The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act
- “Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people,” Blanche said
NEW YORK: The Justice Department said Friday that it was releasing many more records from its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, resuming disclosures under a law intended to reveal what the government knew about the millionaire financier’s sexual abuse of young girls and his interactions with rich and powerful people including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents in the latest Epstein disclosure, as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
The files, which were being posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release of documents in December.
The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted after months of public and political pressure that requires the government to open its files on the late financier and his confidant and onetime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the act,” Blanche said at a news conference announcing the disclosure.
The prospect of previously unseen records tying Epstein to famous figures has long animated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and others who have clamored for a full accounting that even Blanche acknowledged might not be met by the latest document dump.
“There’s a hunger, or a thirst, for information that I don’t think will be satisfied by review of these documents,” he said.
He insisted that, “We did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect — or not protect — anybody,” Blanche said.
After missing a Dec. 19 deadline set by Congress to release all of the files, the Justice Department said it tasked hundreds of lawyers with reviewing the records to determine what needs to be redacted, or blacked out.
Among the materials being withheld from release Friday is information that could jeopardize any ongoing investigation or expose the identities of potential victims of sex abuse. All women other than Maxwell have been redacted from videos and images being released Friday, Blanche said.
The number of documents subject to review has ballooned to roughly six million, including duplicates, the department said.
The Justice Department released tens of thousands of pages of documents just before Christmas, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs and court records. Many of them were either already public or heavily blacked out.
Those records included previously released flight logs showing that Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet in the 1990s, before they had a falling out, and several photographs of Clinton. Neither Trump, a Republican, nor Clinton, a Democrat, has been publicly accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and both have said they had no knowledge he was abusing underage girls.
Also released last month were transcripts of grand jury testimony from FBI agents who described interviews they had with several girls and young women who said they were paid to perform sex acts for Epstein.
Epstein killed himself in a New York jail cell in August 2019, a month after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.
In 2008 and 2009, Epstein served jail time in Florida after pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18. At the time, investigators had gathered evidence that Epstein had sexually abused underage girls at his home in Palm Beach, but the US attorney’s office agreed not to prosecute him in exchange for his guilty plea to lesser state charges.
In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of his underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence at a prison camp in Texas, after being moved there from a federal prison in Florida. She denies any wrongdoing.
US prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse of girls, but one of his victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, accused him in lawsuits of having arranged for her to have sexual encounters at age 17 and 18 with numerous politicians, business titans, noted academics and others, all of whom denied her allegations.
Among the people she accused was Britain’s Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after the scandal led to him being stripped of his royal titles. Andrew denied having sex with Giuffre but settled her lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.
Giuffre died by suicide at her farm in Western Australia last year at age 41.
