Prague, March 27 (CTK) – Another police team left the Czech Republic yesterday to help protect the Macedonian border near the town of Gevgelija in the next weeks, Police Presidium spokeswoman Ivana Nguyenova told CTK, adding that this is the ninth police mission of its kind.
The team will stay in Macedonia until May 9.
Prague has sent a total of 294 police officers within the rotating missions so far, Nguyenova said.
“The officers will mainly perform preventive activities, i.e. checks of people and supervision of the public peace, in Gevgelia, a town near the Macedonian-Greek border,” she said.
The team’s equipment includes off road vehicles and thermal vision devices.
The 40-strong team includes 28 newcomers who never served in Macedonia before, and also two police dog handlers with three dogs.
At the same time, the police team that stayed in Macedonia from February returned to the Czech Republic this morning.
The Czech police’s foreign missions started in 2015 when the migrant crisis broke out.
The Czechs have operated along the Balkan route that hundreds of thousands migrants used, mainly in 2015, to go from Turkey to Central Europe via the Aegean Sea and the West Balkans.
Apart from Macedonia, the Czech police previously also operated in Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia and Greece, mostly helping protect the border, making security checks and supervising the public peace. They form border patrols together with their counterparts from the host country.
rtj/dr/pv
