A report by the NGO No Name Kitchen accused Croatian police of incinerating migrants" belongings – including clothing, mobile phones, and passports – and pushing asylum seekers back at the border. The organization No Name Kitchen (NNK) this week said an investigation conducted between October 2023 and August 2024 had found evidence of secret sites where Croatian border police had destroyed the personal belongings of migrants trying to cross and seek asylum in the European Union. In a report entitled "Burned Borders", the activist group accuses authorities in Croatia of employing "a systematic and brutal modus operandi" against migrants, including stripping them of their belongings to burn in front of them. The report identifies the locations of eight "burn piles" in Croatia, where personal items were allegedly destroyed. "Hundreds of melted phones, remnants of clothing, backpacks, shoes, passports and ... folders which usually hold people"s official documents used to apply for asylum" were among the items found at the burn sites, according to NNK. Esme, Border Violence Reference at NNK told InfoMigrants: "After so much physical, psychological, and administrative violence at the hands of the European border regime, forcing people to watch their belongings burnt in front of them must be understood as a part of a broader attempt to strip people of their autonomy, dehumanise them, and deprive them of remaining connections to culture and identity." Croatian interior ministry rejects claims Human rights organizations have documented many instances of violence, robbery, and pushbacks of migrants trying to cross the Balkans towards the EU. They accuse Croatian authorities of multiple violations of international law, which mandates that asylum seekers must have the opportunity to apply for asylum once within a country"s borders. In response to the most recent claims as reported in The Guardian on Thursday (October 10), Croatia"s interior ministry released a statement saying that it had no knowledge of the alleged events, which had not been confirmed. (Machine translation of the text of the statement in Croatian.) The statement says that Croatian police have consistently implemented measures to protect the EU"s external borders and rejects the allegation of "ever" having conducted illegal pushbacks. It also says that smuggler groups, which it says are mostly operated by Afghan migrants, "often beat and steal things from migrants," citing recent cases of gun fights between smugglers in the Bosnian border area. After detailing a number of cases of what the foreign ministry describes as false testimonies by migrants, the statement responds to the specific accusation of burning migrants" belongings, saying that migrants themselves "leave and reject personal belongings and things they carry with them, and sometimes destroy them to make them hard to identify, because as asylum seekers they want to avoid returning from other EU Member States to Croatia." InfoMigrants independently sought comment from Croatian authorities on October 10, but received no reply.