TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Belarusian authorities said Friday they are willing to investigate the death of a Polish soldier who was stabbed at the border last month, but we did not receive the necessary information from Poland.
A statement from the country’s border service said it would carry out a unilateral or joint investigation if Poland presented “concrete information”.
The soldier was stabbed last month on the eastern border with Belarus, the Polish military said on Thursday. Previously, he had said that the soldier was stabbed in the chest by a migrant that passed through the bars of the border barrier.
The Polish Foreign Ministry on Thursday summoned the Belarusian chargé d’affaires, demanding that Minsk authorities identify and hand over the soldier’s “killer,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said.
The situation on the European Union’s eastern border is increasingly tense under pressure from thousands of people from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, who are trying to force their way through a metal mesh. barrier that Poland placed in 2022 to seal the border.
The latest figures from the Polish Border Guard say there have been around 17,000 attempts to cross the border illegally this year.
A spokesman for the Warsaw prosecutor’s office, Piotr Skiba, said an autopsy carried out on Friday determined that the soldier, Mateusz Sitek, died from a stab wound to the lung that caused damage to the central nervous system. Media reports said he was 21 years old.
