A refugee who was among a group of asylum-seekers from Afghanistan has been shot by border guards in Bulgaria, and has succumbed to his wounds, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry says.
A ministry spokeswoman, whose name was not mentioned in the reports, said on Friday that the shooting occurred on Thursday evening when a big group of illegal refugees attempted to enter Bulgaria from Turkey near the southeastern Bulgarian town of Sredets.
She said the refugee who was shot was from Afghanistan and died on the way to hospital.
The spokeswoman did not provide the details of the incident, but the Interior Ministry’s chief of staff Georgy Kostov said the refugees “put up resistance” during an arrest attempt, adding that one of the officers fired warning shots and a refugee “was wounded by a ricochet.”
The official said an investigation has been launched into the issue, adding that the incident prompted Prime Minister Boyko Borisov to leave a European Union (EU) summit in Brussels and fly back home on Thursday.
Bulgaria, a non-Schengen zone member of the EU, has been hardly involved in the continent’s unprecedented refugee crisis, with the recent refugee incident being the first of its kind as the refugees previously bypassed the country on their way to reach Western Europe.
Bulgaria has built a 30-kilometer razor wire fence along a part of its porous 260-kilometer (160-mile) border with Turkey, and has dispatched some 2,000 border guards, police and army to guard the remaining part of the border.
The International Organization for Migration says more than 600,000 asylum seekers have landed on Europe's shores since January, while more than 3,000 have died or gone missing trying to reach Europe.