Polish Muslims bury Iraqi migrant's baby that died during pregnancy

In a tiny white coffin, the body of an unborn child that died in the womb of its mother near the Polish-Belarusian border was buried in a Muslim cemetery in north-east Poland on Tuesday. In Islam, unborn children are also given funeral rites.

The deceased child, named Halikari Dhaker, was buried in the village's Muslim cemetery near two Syrian and one African migrant, whose funerals were held within the last 10 days.

Halikari Dhaker's mother miscarried him while she, her husband and their five children crossed the Belarusian-Polish border through dense forests and wetlands.

The funeral, attended by two Chechen men from the Muslim community in Poland, was led by local Imam Aleksander Bazarewicz outside a mosque for the Tatars in Bohoniki.

As the first snow of the winter lay on the fields around the cemetery, the coffin was lowered into the ground by Bazarewicz and a Chechen Muslim man who took part in the funeral.

Hailing from Iraqi Kurdistan, Dhaker's family were among thousands of migrants who travelled to Belarus in the hope of crossing into the European Union.

Dhaker’s family did not attend the funeral. "The family of the dead child Halikari Dhaker are not here with us... As far as I know, the wife, the mother, is in a very serious medical state in a hospital," said the Imam of the village of Bohoniki, which is home to a Tatar Muslim community.

A small ethnic and religious minority in overwhelmingly homogenous and Catholic modern Poland, the Tatars descend from warriors who were rewarded with land by Polish kings for protecting the country's eastern border centuries ago.

The community has been delivering clothes and food to both migrants and Polish troops on the border.

Humanitarian agencies say as many as 13 migrants have died on the Poland-Belarus border with snow setting in and worsening the chances for survival of migrants hiding in the Podlasie forests.

Poland accused Belarus of continuing to ferry migrants to its border, despite clearing camps close to the frontier last week.

European countries have for months accused Belarus of engineering the migrant crisis by flying in migrants from the Middle East and pushing them to try to illegally cross into the European Union via Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who denies the allegations that he fomented the crisis, has pressured the EU and Germany in particular to accept some migrants while Belarus repatriates others, a demand the bloc has so far flatly rejected.