The first car to stop was driven by Pawel Cywinski, a Border Group activist who was passing by chance.

He called an ambulance who took the Iraqi man to hospital but the driver refused to carry his wife, citing Covid-19 restrictions. She was left behind in the woods, with their Syrian companion, and no way to contact her husband.

Then suddenly police arrived and cordoned off the area. “I don’t know who called them. We didn’t,” Mr Cywinski told the Telegraph later.

Officers were polite but firmly barred the Telegraph and other activists who arrived from accessing the scene, including a volunteer Arabic translator.

The only person who could communicate between the victims of the assault and the police, the activists, or anyone else was forced to stand 50 yards away and translate questions from Polish over the phone.

The Iraqi woman and the Syrian man were whisked away by the army

The account of their ordeal was told by the Syrian member of the group via that conversation.

The standoff went on for hours while volunteers pleaded for the woman to be reunited with her husband and argued that the refugees must be taken to the nearest border guards office for official processing of their asylum requests.

As it grew dark the temperature dropped sharply. Then the army appeared with a lorry. A helicopter flew low over the black woods in the direction of the military exclusion zone next to the border.

The Iraqi woman and the Syrian man were whisked away. The negotiations, Mr Cywinski said, had failed.

“They are taking them to Bialowieska,” he said, referring to village inside the forbidden zone near the border that has become a temporary base for army and police in the confrontation with Belarus. “In our experience, that means they are going to be pushed back.

“The woman is in deep distress. She has been separated from her husband and they have no phones. All we know is the name of the hospital, but they won’t let us in because of Covid.”

All the activists could do was file a police report about the assault.