Greek police have allegedly recruited masked migrants to forcibly push other migrants back across the land border with Turkey, according to internal documents and witness accounts uncovered by the BBC. The BBC’s investigation, conducted in collaboration with the Consolidated Rescue Group (CRG), has revealed allegations of brutality, including reports of migrants being stripped, robbed, beaten, and even sexually assaulted.

Internal Documents and Witness Accounts

We have seen internal police documents in which guards describe how the recruitment of so-called mercenaries was ordered and overseen by senior officers. One border guard told a disciplinary hearing they had information, reported to their superiors, that mercenaries had been raping female migrants. Two migrants and an ex-mercenary say they saw extreme violence by both mercenaries and Greek police, including people being beaten until they passed out.

A migrant said a masked man took off her daughter’s nappy in the hunt for valuables. The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, told the BBC he was ‘totally unaware’ about allegations of the use of migrants for pushbacks. The country’s authorities have not responded to our written detailed requests for comment.

Pushbacks and International Law

Pushbacks—forcing migrants and asylum seekers back across borders without due process—are generally considered illegal under international law. The BBC has been shown footage from 22 June 2023 in which a group of migrants, who had just crossed into Evros and wanted to claim asylum, were ambushed by masked men. A report into this incident by the Fundamental Rights Office, an independent investigator within Frontex, found that between 10 and 20 ‘third-country nationals’ had been acting under the instruction of Greek officers.

The report said that the migrants were subjected to physical and verbal abuse, including ‘death and rape threats, intrusive and sexualised body searches,’ as well as beating, stabbing, restraining, and theft of personal property. The migrants were then forcibly transported back to Turkey, in violation of EU human rights law. The Greek authorities have denied that any migrants from this group were found in the area on that day.

Human Rights Concerns

Maria Gavouneli, the president of Greece’s human rights commission (GNCHR), said our findings could amount to an ‘extremely significant’ abuse of human rights. The organisation has itself recorded more than 100 incidents of alleged forced returns in Evros, dating back to 2020. While it says cases have been declining, dozens of these alleged incidents have involved non-Greek, third country nationals—most recently in October 2025.

We have spoken to two Syrian migrants who claim to have been forced back to Turkey across the River Evros. Amal (not her real name) showed us videos and documentation of her family in Greece, where they had applied for asylum. Her family, she says, was unexpectedly detained by police in 2025 while walking through the city of Orestiada, in northern Evros. They were handed to two masked men who demanded they surrender their phones and IDs before driving them to the border in a windowless white van.

A further search at the river was far worse, she says. ‘My daughter was wearing a diaper, they took it off,’ Amal says. ‘She was screaming in fear.’ Next, she says, the masked men, who now numbered roughly seven, herded them and about 20 others down a track, using sticks to keep them in line. ‘As we were walking, there was a young man… they beat him so much that he fainted.’ She says her daughters, who witnessed this, ‘were in a state of shock, terrified, crying.’

Another Syrian migrant, Ahmad, has told us that he was beaten to the point of unconsciousness by Greek police, after being picked up in Evros. He says that the next day he was among dozens of migrants who were loaded into a truck: ‘Because of the crowding and the smell, people were suffocating. We couldn’t breathe.’

Ahmad says the police brought the migrants to the River Evros and lined them up in groups. They were then handed over to five or six mercenaries who stripped the men and searched them before using sticks to beat anyone who tried to hide money. The migrants were loaded into rubber dinghies, he says, and rowed halfway across the river. He says the mercenaries didn’t dare go any further because of fears that Turkish border guards would shoot.

If migrants didn’t jump from the boat, he claims, they were thrown out: ‘The water could sweep people away. They didn’t care at all.’ Both Amal and Ahmad undertook dangerous, unlawful journeys to reach Greece, but Ahmad argues he, like others, faced no choice. ‘I was dying slowly in Syria,’ he says. ‘People didn’t leave their homes for no reason—they lived through the worst torture, oppression, and injustice.’