Video shows Bulgarian police shooting teenage Syrian asylum seeker at Turkey border

New video footage has emerged showing Bulgarian police shooting a Syrian teenager close to the border with Turkey.

The footage, shared on Twitter on Monday by the Dutch NGO Lighthouse Reports, shows a group of Syrian men at the border between Turkey and Bulgaria being shot at, with one being injured in his hand and chest.

Lighthouse Reports said that the incident took place on October 3 2022 and was the first video footage showing a refugee being shot on a European border.

The NGO said that the footage “poses serious questions to EU leaders over the bloc’s approach to migration and asylum amid an escalation of violence and illegal pushbacks”.

In the video, a shot is heard and one man, identified by Lighthouse Reports as 19-year-old Abdullah El Rustum Mohammed, falls to the ground clutching his left arm.

Another man shouts “they shot him! They shot him!”.

The video then shows the men gathered around Mohammed.

“This is Bulgaria, they shot him,” one of the men says, before swearing in Arabic.

Mohammed is then carried away by the other men amid frantic shouting.

Warning: Contains distressing footage and obscene language
 

REVEALED: First ever footage of a refugee being shot at an EU border@LHReports has obtained this shocking video where European border guards shoot a young Syrian refugee w/live ammunition at the Bulgaria-Turkey border

THREAD pic.twitter.com/MdZ0dWn98P

— Lighthouse Reports (@LHreports) December 5, 2022

Bulgarian police have said that they were at the scene of the shooting but denied firing the bullet that wounded Mohammed.

However, Lighthouse Reports said that it led a coalition of media organisations including Sky News, The Times, and Le Monde which found that the refugees were shot at from the same position as where border police were present at the time.

Video and audio analysis confirmed the presence of the border police and the shots fired by them, with Land Rover Discovery vehicles used by them visible in the footage, as well as uniformed figures.

Lighthoure Reports said that Mohammed was left with “life-changing injuries” and was lucky to be alive. The bullet passed through his hand and landed in his chest, just one centimetre from his heart, according to medical records seen by the NGO.

“The doctor told me that I barely made it because the bullet entered exactly down to the heart,” Mohammed told Lighthouse Reports. “Now my hand is half paralysed in my left arm and I have two fractions in my rib cage”.

Mohammed and those accompanying him returned to Istanbul following the incident.

Lighthouse Reports said that similar incidents had occurred before, according to eyewitnesses, but this was the first to be recorded on film.