Border guard shoots dead asylum-seeker as leaders search for deal on crisis

Bulgarian border guards have shot and killed a migrant trying to enter the country from Turkey. The man was with a crowd of people from Afghanistan when he was shot near the town of Sredets and died on his way to hospital. “Our border patrol of border guards and police in the area had stumbled on 50 offenders, who illegally entered the country,”  interior ministry official Georgi Kostov said. “They put up resistance during the arrest. One of the officers fired warning shots and, in his words, one of the migrants was wounded by a ricochet and later died.”

We deplore the death of an Afghan asylum seeker, trying to reach safety across the border. Seeking asylum is an universal human right and not a crime.

Boris Cheshirkov, spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency

The incident happened as European leaders met to agree a united approach to secure the group’s external borders. Details are being thrashed out of a deal offered to Turkey, which has asked for £2.3bn in aid to help it cope with an influx of migrants. It also hopes to use the crisis as leverage for its ambitions to join the EU. Meanwhile, the number of migrants in the Calais camp on France’s north coast has doubled to close to 6,000 people, French officials say. Also, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte says his government is raising the maximum jail sentence for convicted people-smugglers from four years to six years

Our intensified meetings with Turkish leaders… in the last couple of weeks were devoted to one goal: stemming the migratory flows that go via Turkey to the EU. The action plan is a major step in this direction

EU council president Donald Tusk