A few days after Christmas, while Bulgaria was carpeted in snow, the bodies of three Egyptian boys were found by human rights defenders that I was volunteering with.

Seifalla Elbeltagy, 15, Ahmed Samra, 16, and Ahmed Elawdan, 17, all died of hypothermia alone in a forest.

This was despite the fact that the emergency services had been aware that they were in grave danger more than a day earlier.

In another part of the country at around the same time, myself and two friends were being arrested by Bulgaria’s UK-funded border police.

Our crime? We were never told. “Possibility of having information relating to a crime”, my detention papers apparently said in Bulgarian.

I was volunteering with a group that provides food and community spaces for people-on-the-move who, in Bulgaria, are mostly Syrian refugees.

I also participated in volunteer-led searches when we received information of people at risk of death close to the Turkish border, one of the “safer” routes for refugees seeking asylum in the European Union.

Frozen

On 27 December 2024, we informed Bulgarian authorities multiple times via the 112 emergency line that Elbeltagy, Samra and Elawdan were in danger of dying from hypothermia.

However the border police – despite having personnel on the ground and the best off-road vehicles – refused to go to the aid of these teenagers freezing to death.

Not only this, balaclava-clad officers actively blocked volunteers from reaching them and vandalised one of our cars, despite being told by us on the ground about the troubling and deteriorating health of the boys.

The first two bodies were discovered the following day when volunteers managed to return to the area, as documented in the Frozen Lives report.

Volunteers were horrified to see both boot prints and dog tracks surrounding the body of Ahmed Samra, which indicates that he’d been found by the border police at some point.

Whether he was already dead or still alive, the border police left him there in the snow alone.

Although present on the 27th, I wasn’t a part of the teams that found their bodies the next day, as I was responding to another distress call in a different part of Bulgaria.

Yet the border police there were no better. When we told them we had found two men succumbing to hypothermia, we were arrested without ever being told what was the charge.

They strip-searched the female member of our team and later put me alone in a jail cell for nearly four hours without any explanation.

The Egyptian boys who froze to death in Bulgaria were not the only fatalities near that border. I am aware of at least nine suspicious deaths since July 2023 close to the border.

This being said, these recent events represent a very worrying deterioration in behaviour from Bulgarian border police and they are operating with seemingly no accountability whatsoever.

Not only do they appear willing to leave children to die, they seem happy to detain and abuse those who might try to stop such horrors from happening.

UK funding

You’d be forgiven for thinking, “What does this have to do with the UK after Brexit?” As a matter of fact, the UK has a long-standing relationship with Bulgaria’s border police.

In 2016, the UK government donated 40 Land Rovers to them, and just over a year ago in February 2024, then foreign secretary David Cameron visited Bulgaria, where he pledged a further £1.2m of support.

This “aid” funded training as well as capacity support, said to include “border surveillance drones, vehicle search training, search dog training equipment and thermal imaging devices”.

Advocacy groups have already collected extensive testimonies of these technologies being used for violence, and various human rights abuses including degrading treatment and torture.

Drones and other surveillance equipment are routinely used by police across south-eastern Europe to locate and then abuse people-on-the-move.

A 30-year-old Moroccan man believes that Bulgarian border police watched on cameras as his group of ten almost drowned crossing a deep river one night last March.

Once they reached the other side, police made them undress and took their phones and money.

Two of the group were hit with rubber batons while an officer brandished a taser. They were then made to wade back through the river and into Turkey without their clothes.

Such allegations are not new. When Cameron visited Bulgaria as prime minister in 2015, Oxfam warned: “Refugees who have crossed the Bulgaria border tell of extortion, robbery, physical violence, police dog attacks and threats of deportation at the hands of Bulgarian officials. In a recent survey of over 100 refugees, all those who had some contact with Bulgarian police told of abuse.”

The UK Foreign Office, and by extension the British taxpayer, is funding a border force at the edge of Europe who are routinely committing human rights abuses.

I have written to Labour MPs Emily Thornberry, the chair of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, and Fabian Hamilton, who runs the All Party Parliamentary Group on human rights, asking them to conduct an inquiry.

Yet the chances of a shift in government policy seem slim, considering that last month Britain reportedly donated seven more Land Rovers, two drones and 60 thermal imaging cameras to Bulgaria’s border police.