An as-yet-unnamed 25-year-old man has become the first refugee to be shot dead trying to enter the European Union when he was struck by a bullet fired by a Bulgarian border guard. The young Afghan, who died on Thursday, had been among 54 refugees making their way to a better life in Europe when two guards tried to stop them.
He may be just one of thousands to perish on the hazardous journey westwards this year, and just one soul among the more than 700,000 refugees to seek asylum in the EU. But his death is a shocking illustration of the irony that, even as the EU opens its gates to refugees, it is adding guards to these gates.
The young Afghan’s death is just one element in the whirling vortex of Europe’s refugee crisis, but it is a particularly grim landmark. Officials say he was probably killed by a stray bullet that ricocheted off the bridge under which he was hiding, near the town of Sredets in south-east Bulgaria — around 20 miles from the border with Turkey, a country that has become pivotal to the EU’s response to the crisis.
Within Bulgaria, the death prompted widely different reactions. Atanas Atanassov, the chair of the parliamentary committee on internal security and a minority partner in the coalition government, said: “In such a situation, we are talking about murder.” But Valeri Simeonov, co-leader of the nationalist Patriotic Front, took a contrasting stance. “The Bulgarian border police officers should be given medals because they were doing their job,” he said.