No Sign Of 4-Year-Old Refugee Girl Who Went Missing In An Icy Forest Along Poland Border

There have been no signs of the four-year-old Iraqi girl who went missing Monday night in an icy forest after border guards pushed her, along with her family, back into Belarus.

Activists in the European Union country have been desperately searching for Eileen for days in vain, reported Al Jazeera.

Polish border guards have been keeping its frontier with Belarus sealed to keep out thousands of refugees who travel to the landlocked country in the hope of crossing into European Union territory.

Reports said hours before the girl went missing, her parents, who are from Iraq, crossed the frontier under the cover of night with a group of other migrants and refugees. Since they were exhausted, they asked one of their companions to carry their daughter.

However, a Polish border guard patrol who appeared there dispersed the group. Eileen’s parents were pushed back by a Polish guard to the barbed-wire fence. The couple soon found that the girl was missing. They said the guard did not react to the news.

The child was last seen with the person accompanying her near the Polish frontier village of Nowy Dwor.

"This girl is probably either already dead or will die very soon. The most dramatic thing is that if it was a Polish child, the whole country would be looking for her," Kasia Kosciesza from the Families without Borders charity group was quoted by Reuters.

However, Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska said the servicemen started searching for the girl as soon as they received the information she was missing around midday on Tuesday. "Extra patrols were directed to the area where the girl was supposed to be. We also searched from the air using helicopters, but we found no one," Michalska told Reuters.

The Polish Border Guard too tweeted that "no children were found in the area monitored by the Border Guard."

"During the night, the border, and especially the sections where attempts of illegal crossings were recorded, were patrolled both on the ground and from the air using [night and thermal vision technology]," the tweet read.

Meanwhile, there were reports that the body of a man was discovered in a forest in Poland close to the Belarusian border.

"The body was found in a forest near Olchowka in the Narewka commune yesterday," local police was quoted by Rudaw, adding that the man was found with a Nigerian passport.