A five-year-old migrant girl reported to have died trying to cross from Turkey into Greece may never have existed, an investigation has claimed.
A number of reports from the major German publication Der Spiegel claiming that a five-year-old migrant girl died while trying to enter the European Union have seemingly been taken down amid claims that the child in question may never have existed.
Countries across Europe are seeing a renewed surge of migrants appear on their borders as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine, with arrivals from developing nations also increasing.
Accusations that authorities have mistreated migrants have also been widespread, with EU border states Italy and Greece in particular often being attacked by legacy media outlets and open borders activists over their handling of the influx.
However, according to a report by Medien Insider, there are now significant doubts in regard to one prominent case that is said to have occurred on the border between Turkey and Greece.
According to a number of now-deleted articles published by German outlet Der Spiegel, a five-year-old girl named Maria who was looking to gain access to the European Union ended up stranded between the two countries when trying to cross.
She is then said to have eventually died when no one came to help her.
However, despite Der Spiegel‘s reporting, there are now doubts as to whether Maria ever existed.
Not long after Der Spiegel reported Maria’s plight in September, Greece’s Migration Minister, Notis Mitarachi, wrote to the publication’s editor-in-chief to express doubts about the story, according to Bild.
Regarding the report, the Greek government minister is said to have accused the publication of passing on “unfiltered” information originally sourced from an NGO.
Der Spiegel is now reportedly said to be investigating the matter.
While it is ultimately not known whether a migrant girl named Maria did or did not in fact die while trying to cross from Turkey into Greece at the present time, the notion that an interested party would fake such a death for the sake of an agenda is not unheard of.
For example, in the past, at least one campaigner has admitted to having faked the death of a migrant, with one incident of this occurring in Germany back in 2016.
Before being uncovered as a hoax, the story of the migrant man — who was said to have died in the Berlin cold while waiting for relief handouts — had been widely reported in the German media, resulting in significant pressure being piled onto authorities at the time.
However, once it was found that there were no records for the dead individual in any hospital or morgue, suspicion about the incident arose, with the campaigner in question reportedly admitting that he made the death up when eventually queried on it by police.
“This is one of the most rotten and insidious actions that I have ever seen,” one local politician said in the wake of the revelation, expressing anger that authorities had to dedicate hours of their time searching for evidence of a dead migrant who never existed in the first place.
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