By Chloe Hadjimatheou

BBC News, Athens

Greek police have stepped up efforts to catch illegal immigrants in recent months, launching a new operation to check the papers of people who look foreign. But tourists have also been picked up in the sweeps – and at least two have been badly beaten.

When Korean backpacker Hyun Young Jung was stopped by a tall scruffy looking man speaking Greek on the street in central Athens he thought it might be some kind of scam, so he dismissed the man politely and continued on his way.

A few moments later he was stopped again, this time by a man in uniform who asked for his documents. But as a hardened traveller he was cautious.

Greece was the 16th stop in his two-year-long round-the-world trip and he’d often been warned about people dressing in fake uniforms to extract money from backpackers, so while he handed over his passport he also asked the man to show him his police ID.

Instead, Jung says, he received a punch in the face.

Within seconds, the uniformed man and his plainclothes partner – the man who had first approached Jung – had him down on the ground and were kicking him, according to the Korean.

In shock, Jung was by now convinced he was being mugged by criminals and began shouting for help from passers-by.

“I was very scared,” he says.

It was only when he was handcuffed and dragged 500m (500 yards) up the road to the nearest police station that he realised he was actually under arrest.

Jung says that outside the station the uniformed officer, without any kind of warning, turned on him again, hitting him in the face.

“There were members of the public who saw what happened, like the man who works in the shop opposite the police station, but they were too afraid to help me,” he says.

Inside the police station, Jung says he was attacked a third time in the stairwell where there were no people or cameras.

“I can understand them asking me for ID and I even understand that there may have been a case to justify them hitting me in the first instance. But why did they continue beating me after I was handcuffed?” he asks.

Jung was held with a number of migrants from Africa and Asia who had also been rounded up as part of the police’s anti-immigration operation Xenios Zeus – named, strangely, after the ancient Greek god of hospitality.

The operation aims to tackle the wave of illegal immigration which over the last decade has changed the face of Athens’s city centre.

It is thought that up to 95% of undocumented migrants entering the European Union arrive via Greece, and because border controls make it hard to continue into the rest of Europe many end up stuck in the country.

According to some estimates, immigrants could now make up as much as 10% of the population.

 

Note: In July last year, 38-year-old Christian Ukwuorji, a US citizen born in Nigeria, visited Greece with his wife and three children. They visited Rhodes and Santorini, and stopped in Athens on the way back.

It was while he was walking in central Athens with a friend that Ukwuorji was stopped and asked for his ID by the Greek police. Despite showing them his US passport, he was detained with a group of immigrants and taken to the police station.

While there Ukwuorji says he tried to take a photograph of his handcuffs on his mobile phone but when officers saw what he was doing they jumped on him, beating him until he passed out. He woke up in hospital with concussion.

The police returned his passport and his damaged mobile phone. He was not charged with any offence. The US Embassy has requested an investigation, but six months on there has been no word from the police. Ukwuorji believes he was the victim of racism and says he will never visit Greece again.

For more on this story go to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20958353