Police in Croatia are looking for 10 young handball players from Burundi who have disappeared before a world championship match.
The Primorje-Gorski Kotar county police department said efforts were under way to locate the players and determine the facts of their disappearance.
According to information available, the players, all born in 2006, had been staying at the Rijeka student centre, which they left last Wednesday. Police said the players had not been returning calls since.
A statement from the Croatian police said: “The police have received the notification about the absence of Burundian citizens who were participating in the world championship for cadets.
“On Wednesday around [3.30pm] they left in an unknown direction. Measures and actions are being taken to find the missing handball players and establish all relevant facts and circumstances of their disappearance.”
The Croatian Handball Federation said that before a match with Bahrain the Burundi players left the campus without the permission of their technical staff.
The president of the Burundi Handball Federation, Dauphin Nikobamye, said they were in shock. “Both we as a federation and the parents of these young players ask all those who can help us to find them,” he said. ‘‘I don’t know how we will return home without them.”
According to media reports, the players may have planned their escape, using their visas to seek asylum in Europe.
In 2019, two Nigerian student table tennis players were wrongly deported to Bosnia by Croatian police who mistook them for undocumented migrants. They had regular visas granting them permission to be in Croatia at the time of their detention, but policedid not believe them and forcibly sent them to Bosnia without verifying their status.
That day, Croatian authorities had intercepted a group of people attempting to cross the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Police in Croatia denied any wrongdoing and raised doubts over the table tennis players’ intentions. According to the police, another Nigerian who participated in the championship had attempted to cross the border from Croatia to Slovenia a few days before.
