Tusk says fence on Belarusian border 'doesn't exist'

Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Coalition, Poland’s largest opposition grouping, has said "we have to build a wall on the border with Belarus" because there isn’t one there at the moment.

Tusk's words come despite the government spending millions of zloty on a new high-tech fence along the Belarusian border to prevent migrants from getting into the country.

But the opposition claims that the border is still porous, evidenced by German complaints about the number of migrants getting into Germany from Poland.

Asked by reporters on Wednesday, if the wall would be dismantled if the opposition was victorious in the upcoming elections Tusk said: "We have to build a wall on the border with Belarus because there really isn't any such wall there, it's all fiction."

Tusk added that there were advertisements on the internet in Arab and African countries saying that visas could be bought cheaply because "the Polish Foreign Affairs Ministry was peddling visas."

Smugglers, he continued, were placing advertisements on the internet, and saying that the Polish-Belarusian border was fiction because the fence could be crossed.

The Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper wrote last week that Poland's Foreign Ministry might have allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to come to Europe by accepting bribes in return for issuing visas.

The cash-for-visas affair has come as an awkward blow for a government that has made controlling immigration central to its campaign for Poland's October 15 general election.