Three migrants and two police officers were heavily injured in the fight involving over two hundred migrants on Friday late night in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH’s) city of Bihac, located 310 kilometers northwest of the capital.
The fight was reported to the police by members of the security service, saying it was “impossible to control the situation”, and after the swift intervention, police officers separated the conflicting groups, Ministry of Internal Affairs of Una Sana Canton (MUPUSK) confirmed for local media on Saturday.
The fight started in the reception center in Bihac, resulting in over 20 migrants injured, and 11 deprived of liberty.
“Eleven people were deprived of liberty, eight of them Afghans, two from India and one from Pakistan, because of suspicion of committing a crime,”Ale Siljeldic, a spokesman of the MUP USK, told local media.
Significant material damage occurred in the conflict, beds and other inventories inside the Bira reception center were destroyed.
In January this year, 200 local police officers conducted a raid in the reception center and found over 50 pieces of cold weapons used by migrants.
A total of 23,902 migrants have been registered on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period from January to December last year, mainly from Pakistan (7,770), Iran (3,663), Syria (3,017), Afghanistan (2,780) and Iraq (2,184).
Hundreds of thousands of migrants passed through the so-called “Balkan route” in 2015, trying to reach Western Europe. BiH was then not part of that route. The increasing number of migrants was recorded from the end of 2017, and since January this year.
