Locals called the police when they heard the shots, and the police arrived only to count the dead. Three migrants were killed and one was wounded in a shootout near Horgoš, the police department in Kikinda confirmed.
The shooting took place near the abandoned buildings of the former agricultural estate "Bačka". There are strong police forces on the ground, it is not known if there are any arrests.
A long bloody streak
Thus, lawlessness continued in the 175-kilometer strip of the Serbian-Hungarian border. It is clearly ruled by smuggling gangs, which are often the only hope for migrants to be smuggled out of Serbia to Western Europe.
The news is similar to each other. In July of this year, one Afghan was killed and two others were wounded in a confrontation in Hajdukov near Subotica. A few days earlier, three Syrians were wounded with firearms in the same region.
In November last year, in the very center of Horgoš, six people were injured in a conflict between Moroccan and Afghan criminals. A video of the confrontation has been released showing armed men running past a primary school.
The locals are desperate, they claim that they are left to their own devices. "It's like we're living in a war zone," said a resident of Makove Sedmica, Subotica's neighborhood of Makove Sedmica, where shootings often take place.
"They shoot at each other, but it's unpleasant when you're sitting in the garden drinking coffee and then a bullet whizzes over your head." "It happened that grains ended up in the walls," he added.
Police working with smugglers?
The Serbian police occasionally carry out larger actions, but clearly fail to regain control.
According to BIRN, the biggest smugglers in the police have not only the background, but also the police officers who work for them.
"This does not happen anywhere else on the Balkan route - only in Serbia is it like this, that smugglers shoot with Kalashnikovs," a smuggler from Syria told BIRN in February of this year with astonishment.
According to the findings of this research network, automatic weapons for smugglers are supplied by Albanian criminals from Kosovo, southern Serbia and Albania.
BIRN specifically investigated the network of Alen Basil Dajub, a Serbian-Syrian citizen who is allegedly one of the key players in the lucrative smuggling of people from Vojvodina to Hungary.
His organization rents places on the border to other smugglers, charging them a one-time fee of 20.000 euros, as well as an additional 5.000 euros in 'rent' per month, BIRN wrote. Depending on the agreement, as well as how many "customers" there are, individual smugglers are obliged to pay the group 200-300 euros "per person".
Hungarian razor-wire policy
Radoš Đurović from the Center for Protection and Assistance to Asylum Seekers claims that the biggest problem is Hungary's "wall and fence policy" and the fact that Hungarians are illegally returning people to Serbian territory.
"It is precisely this that led to the strengthening of smuggling groups to the extent that they become organized structures that engage in armed conflict," Đurović recently told Deutsche Welle.
"Sooner or later, everyone who comes to Serbia manages to pass the Hungarian fence and continue their journey, it's just a question of how many times the Hungarians will hand them back to the smugglers, how many times they will risk their lives and health and pay the smugglers to continue that journey", said Djurovic.
In Serbia, there are officially about three thousand migrants in the reception centers, and the Commissariat for Refugees estimates that there are another thousand outside the centers. This is all far from the figures from the peak of the refugee crisis that flowed through the Balkan route.
However, connoisseurs of the situation claim that even today the numbers are significantly higher. Some say that two to three thousand people a day try to pass the Hungarian razor fence on their way to some of the happier countries of Western Europe.
NR/ N1, Birn, DW, Nova
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