Eurasia Press & News
Their plight was already dire, but in the evening of June 21, 2024, things got even worse for Bilal and the other refugees and migrants trying to cross the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina with European Union member Croatia.
Asylum seekers euphemistically call it ‘The Game’ – the moment they try to sneak across borders through fields and forests.
There is nothing particularly fun about this game, however. Croatian police pushed them back – a common practice on the EU’s borders that has been criticised by human rights experts and Europe’s highest court as a violation of international law. But that was only the start of Bilal’s ordeal.
“A group of men with headscarves and a gun stopped us,” said Bilal [not his real name], a 36-year-old Pakistani. “They caught and detained us. I spent eight days abducted. They beat us. I went two days without food.”
He spoke to BIRN via WhatsApp a few weeks after his family paid a ransom for his release.
Over a months-long investigation, BIRN has determined that Bilal’s detention near the northwestern town of Velika Kladusa was most probably the work of an Afghan crime group known as BWK.
BWK rose to prominence in 2023 and has controlled many of the migrant smuggling routes in Bosnia’s border areas for more than a year.
Over that time, the smugglers’ tactics have changed to adapt to a tightening of the EU’s external frontier. With fewer ‘customers’, the smugglers have embraced more violence, adding theft, kidnapping and extortion to their portfolio and preying in particular on victims of ‘pushbacks’ by border police.
This investigation is based on interviews with victims, local police, smugglers and analysis of TikTok accounts, videos, and case files. The evidence points to BWK as the most violent of the groups operating in Bosnia, using extortion to boost its profits.
According to BIRN’s findings, BWK members send videos of their captives to the captives’ relatives and demand payment in exchange for their release.
Bilal said his family paid 3,500 euros for his freedom, but BIRN has seen information suggesting even bigger ransoms change hands.
Police in the northwestern Bosnian town of Bihac, where BWK has a foothold, said some victims – including minors – had reported being sexually abused, besides being subjected to psychological and physical torture.
Adnan Beganovic, an Interior Ministry spokesman in Bosnia’s Una-Sana Canton, said the gang was targeting individuals “whom they think are from wealthier families”.
“They capture them, physically abuse them, tie them up, threaten them, blackmail them, and so they are forced to give a contact phone number, i.e. to get in touch with their families and let them know that they have to pay the ransom or they will harm them,” Beganovic told BIRN.
They charge as much as 6,000 euros per person, he said, paid into accounts mainly in Turkey, though some sources say there are accounts in the Netherlands and Switzerland too.
“It is a very well-established system,” Beganovic said. How lucrative it is can be seen in the fact that in only one bank account police “discovered around 70,000 euros”.
Torture, threats and ransom demands
Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity said BWK had a presence in the capital, Sarajevo, but its operations are focussed on the areas bordering Montenegro to the south and, particularly, Croatia to the north and west. Since January 1, 2023, Croatia has been a member of Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone.
Some members of BWK used to operate also in Serbia, but as members of other gangs. They withdrew after Serbian police launched a large-scale operation in the summer of 2023 to dismantle the armed smuggling gangs that had waged bloody turf wars on Serbia’s border with Hungary, as BIRN previously reported.
“It became much harder in Serbia,” a Pakistani smuggler, Ahmad [not his real name], told BIRN in a Belgrade bar in September 2024, speaking on condition of anonymity. “That’s why the business transferred to Bosnia.”
In fact, it has gotten harder for refugees and migrants all along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ running from Turkey to Croatia, Slovenia, Italy or Hungary.
The EU’s border agency, Frontex, says the number of illegal border crossing attempts detected dropped 78 per cent between 2023 and 2024.
With smuggling work drying up, gangs like BWK have resorted to theft, kidnapping and extortion. Last year, several Afghans were arrested and charged with violent crimes as members of BWK.
Some members obtained Italian IDs, which would allow them to enter and exit Bosnia at will and evade arrest more easily.
A source within Bosnia’s state bodies gave BIRN photographs of the IDs belonging to five Afghan alleged BWK members. The Pakistani smuggler in Belgrade corroborated the fact that two of them were part of the gang.
Four had documents issued by Italy; of these four, two had received refugee status in Italy while two had so-called ‘subsidiary protection’ – a form of international protection short of refugee status and which is granted to a person at risk of serious harm if returned to their country of origin. The fifth person had received German documents.
The Bosnian source said the Afghans had used the documents to legally enter Bosnia.
BIRN’s investigation uncovered a distinct BWK modus operandi, involving ‘fixers’ who supply information allowing the gang members to intercept asylum seekers crossing into Bosnia from Montenegro and to pick up those pushed back by Croatian police. Some of these fixers are in state-run refugee camps and tip off BWK as to when residents plan to attempt a border crossing.
“There’s definitely a connection between pushbacks and the hostage-taking that I think needs to be underlined,” said Lawrence Jabs, a researcher at Bologna University who has analysed developments in both Serbia and Bosnia.
Jabs said the violence meted out by border police and the smugglers was sometimes strikingly similar.
“From the testimonies I’ve taken from people who were ambushed by police in balaclavas, it is exactly the same as people who were ambushed by these groups,” he told BIRN.
“If you would write it descriptively without giving any context to the characters it would just look like the same people; I think there’s some kind of mimicry going on.”
Knife cuts, kicks to the head
One of N.’s nephews and other people from Kashmir being tortured and filmed for ransom. Faces have been blurred to protect people’s identities. WARNING: This video contains images that some viewers may find disturbing.
In an interview with BIRN, N., from Kashmir, said his teenage nephews were abducted in August 2023, more than a year into their journey from the valley claimed by India and Pakistan.
Before they were caught, N. recalled talking to them by phone, when they told him: “We’re going to Croatia now and we’ll see you in Trieste soon.”
A few hours later N. received a second call. This time it was sister, telling him that his nephews had been abducted and that the hostage takers were demanding a ransom of 400 euros for each.
BIRN has seen the video the abductors sent: it shows five people, including one of N’s nephews, lying on the floor while a man cuts their backs with a knife and kicks their heads. The phone is held by the other nephew, who tells his family that they will be killed if the money is not paid.
N. says the family paid and his nephews were released, and that they were granted a form of international protection in Italy.
“When I saw them arriving in Trieste my heart stopped,” said N, adding that the worst consequences were psychological. “The younger one was so hurt mentally… he didn’t speak to anyone for a month.”
BIRN obtained several videos and photos showing individuals being held in woodland. Some of them were visibly hurt.
In one, a Pakistani man is shown being kicked, his backs bearing red scars.
Turkish citizens are frequent targets given the perception they are wealthier than migrants and refugees from other countries.
In spring 2024, an intermediary put BIRN in touch with a Turkish citizen, who sent these reporters a photo of his cousin, initials O.O., born in 1981. He said the photo showed O.O. sitting on the ground near Velika Kladusa having been abducted, allegedly by members of BWK.
Reports of rape
On the outskirts of Bihac, BIRN met Yusuf [not his real name] in a small cafe playing loud music. A large silver ring on his right hand, the Pakistani is a veteran of migrant smuggling in the Balkans, currently working in Bosnia after years in Serbia. He peppers his solid Serbian with Belgrade street slang.
Yusuf told BIRN he was attacked by members of BWK when he was trying to smuggle a group of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and Nepalese migrants over the border into Croatia in summer last year, not far from Velika Kladusa.
“They beat me; they beat everyone,” he said. “You can’t do anything. They have rifles and pistols.”
After he was robbed, Yusuf said the women in the group and one child, “around 15 years old”, were subjected to sexual violence, including rape. The rest of the group witnessed the assault.
Yusuf said the experience was “horrific” and that he reported it to the police in Velika Kladusa.
His is not the only claim of rape in the border area.
Beganovic, the local interior ministry spokesman, confirmed that police had also received reports of rape. In these reports, however, the victims are all either men or boys.
“We have the information, but we cannot talk about the details because the investigations are still ongoing,” he said.
Smuggler: Police are ‘afraid’
BIRN sources estimated the number of BWK’s kidnapping victims as in the thousands. Some said they reported the group to the cantonal police but were disappointed with the response.
“The police are afraid of them,” said Ahmad, the Pakistani smuggler. “I say that they have rifles, they have guns, they say ‘what can we do?’ or that they did not find anyone. I say put up a drone, they say they don’t have the resources.”
The police did make some arrests in 2024.
In October, local media reported that a group of armed Afghans in Velika Kladusa had captured several groups of migrants and brutally beaten them while recording on phones taken from the victims. They sent the videos to the victims’ families, demanding ransom payments.
At the end of September, four BWK members were arrested in the Velika Kladusa area after they kidnapped four Turkish citizens and demanded that their relatives pay a total of 10,000 euros for their release.
The following month, a Bosnian court convicted two other members of the group on charges of smuggling, illegal weapons possession, kidnapping, extortion and inflicting minor physical harm over the January 2024 abduction of three Iranians they had previously failed to smuggle into Croatia by boat.
One of the defendants was Mohammad Karim Malang, believed to be one of the most influential members of BWK.
The court found that the Afghans had held the Iranians in a World War Two bunker, where they “tied their hands and deprived them of their freedom of movement”. They beat the Iranians, including with bats and glass bottles, threatened them at gunpoint and sent the video to their families, demanding 10,000 euros.
Each defendant was sentenced to 22 months in prison.
Dangerous environment
The violence employed by border police and smugglers alike have the same effect – discouraging would-be asylum seekers from crossing the Balkans.
Croatian police have a particularly bad record.
In a 2024 internal report by an international humanitarian organisation, obtained by BIRN, an Iranian man in his late twenties describes being abused by Croatian police and pushed back into Bosnia on October 12 that year, where he was then caught by an Afghan gang, which robbed him and his two Iranian companions.
The report reads: “Since the Croatian officers had removed their sim cards and damaged their charging ports, he was not able to use his phone. He did, however, describe the location as on the Bosnian-Croatian land border, not too far from Bihac.”
After walking “for an hour or so”, the group encountered three or four Afghan men, whom he described as “rahzan”, meaning bandits or robbers in Farsi. They were armed with weapons including Kalashnikov rifles.
The report added: “Near the group of “bandits”, two corpses were lying on the ground. The respondent described the corpses as the bodies of what seemed to be two young men of Asian descent. The respondent believed them to have been murdered by the “bandits”, as they were covered in blood”.
“The “bandits” threatened the transit crew with their guns, shouting at them to empty their bags and to “give them their phones and their money if they wanted to live”.
“Once the transit crew had given up all their valuables to the “bandits”, they were allowed to leave.”
Maddalena Avon, a legal officer at the Italian Consortium of Solidarity, ICS, said such incidents were part of a broader trend in the Balkans:
“Larger anti-smuggling police operations do not stop smuggling; they only make it less visible. This, in turn, creates an even more dangerous environment for people trying to reach Europe.”
