Shooting In Bosnia Leaves 8-Year-Old Migrant Boy From Iraq Badly Wounded - Police

BELGRADE (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 04th April, 2021) An eight-year-old migrant boy from Iraq has received a severe gunshot wound in a shooting in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Una-Sana canton, which is located on the border with Croatia, according to police.

Shots were fired near a shopping center in the town of Velika Kladusa n Saturday, at about 6:20 p.m. local time (16:20 GMT), possibly after a conflict broke out between two groups of migrants. The Una-Sana canton is considered to be the main hotbed of the migration crisis in the country, which remains a transit route for thousands of undocumented migrants from the middle East and Africa heading to the European Union.

"A boy from Iraq born in 2013 was seriously injured. He does not appear to have been the target, just a random victim. A stray bullet hit him in the back.

Now he is in a serious condition in a hospital, with doctors fighting for his life. He was simply walking nearby with his father," regional police spokesman Ale Siljdedic said, as quoted by the Klix.BA news portal.

The police have yet to determine that migrants were the ones to open fire.

"If these are migrants who used firearms, this will be the first case of a gunshot wound since the beginning of the migrant crisis, and this is a very worrying signal," Siljdedic added.

On March 25, the canton's interior ministry reported another conflict between migrants, involving an attempted murder and a serious stab wound. The largest migrant clash rocked the canton's administrative center of Bihac last October, when two people were killed and 10 injured in a scuffle between migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan.