32 illegal migrants were detained along the Lithuanian border with Belarus over the weekend, Rustams Lubayev, the head of the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service, said on Monday.
Twelve of the migrants were detained in Ignalina district municipality on Saturday, ten were detained on Sunday and ten more on Monday morning, Lubayev said.
“They claim to be Iraqi citizens, but they are also citizens of Syria, Iran and other countries. But most of them are Iraqi citizens. At least that’s what they say,” Lubayev said in an interview on the radio.
He noted that the latest trend for migrants is to come in small groups of ten to 15 people.
This year, almost 450 migrants were caught in Lithuania trying to enter Lithuania illegally from Belarus. In 2020, 81 migrants were captured, in 2019 46 migrants and in 2018 104.
Lithuania has stepped up border controls with Belarus to reduce the recent influx of illegal migrants. In addition to various organizational measures, border guards from other units have been relocated to the border with Belarus and additional technical resources have been deployed there.
As tensions over Belarus escalate, the country’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko recently said that Belarus had so far slowed the flow of drugs and migrants across the Lithuanian border, but that Lithuanians would have to “catch migrants themselves”.
Lithuanian Minister of the Interior Agne Bilotaite at the meeting of the National Security and Defense Committee of the Seimas this month assumed that the increase in the flow of illegal migrants from Belarus could be related to the deliberate actions of the officials of the neighboring country.
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