Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko accused Lithuania of tossing the bodies of dead migrants across the border between the two countries.
Lithuania, a member of the European Union and an ally in the NATO alliance, has — like Poland and Latvia — been subject to illegal migrants attempting to breach its border through neighbouring Belarus for months. Lithuanian officials, like those in Poland, have accused the Soviet-style dictator of manufacturing the migrant crisis, through shipping in people from the Middle East to the European frontier.
In the latest round of bizarre statements from the embattled Belarussian dictator, Lukashenko said on Monday that Lithuanian “scum” have “resorted to killing people.”
“Last night they threw a body on our border, this night another body was found. It was done in the same way. A dead or maybe half-dead person is placed into a sleeping bag and dumped on the border. When border guards come across this migrant, this person is already dead,” the dictator said per the state-run news agency Belta.
“Yesterday, as far as I know, three people were found by border guards on a farm. When they found a corpse, they saw three sleeping bags. They started searching,” he continued.
“Just think of these ‘democrats’. How hideous one must be to throw them into the adjacent territory. It looks like this act is meant to send some message. What kind of message? What is behind this? I think investigators will figure it out,” Lukashenko concluded.
Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service denied the accusations, claiming that the Belarussians have attempted to stage beatings or the killing of migrants for propaganda purposes, Euronews reports.
It is believed that many of the mostly Middle Eastern migrants currently stranded in Belarus were tricked into travelling to Minsk on false promises from Lukashenko lackeys of free passage to Germany. The prospect of migrants freezing to death along the border has been used last month by Lukashenko to blackmail Germany into accepting thousands of migrants, despite his regime allegedly being responsible for their being out in the cold in the first place.
The latest bizarre comments from the Belarussian authoritarian came just one day after Breitbart News published an interview with leading Lithuanian MP Dovilė Šakalienė, who accused Lukashenko of manufacturing the migrant crisis in order to “save his skin”.
Šakalienė said that in contrast to the border with Poland, which has seen thousands of migrants descend upon border barricades, the Belarussian forces have deployed more clandestine tactics on the border with Lithuania, attempting to smuggle multiple smaller groups of migrants simultaneously during the night.
“These are not the tactics of attack, but they are tactics of siege,” the MP said.
The Lithuanian MP said that Lukashenko is conducting a “hybrid attack where people are smuggled into the country, imported like objects.”
“So we are protecting the borders of NATO and the EU from the unpredictable, very hostile dictator, who has instrumentalized migration as a means of political war.”
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