Three children, four women and one man shot dead while trying to escape northern Syria, according to monitors

Eight Syrian refugees have been shot dead by Turkish border guards as they tried to escape war-torn northern Syria, a human rights watchdog has claimed.

Three children, four women and one man were killed on Saturday night, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said a total of 60 Syrian refugees had been shot at the border since the start of the year.

Six of this weekend’s casualties were from the same family, said the observatory’s founder, Rami Abdelrahman. “I sent our activists to hospital there, we have video [of the corpses], but we haven’t published it because there are children [involved],” he said.

The Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists inside Syria, supported the claim, reporting that one of the children was as young as six.

Syrian refugees have been making illegal crossings of the Turkish border as Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon have made it virtually impossible for them to leave Syria legally.

There have been reports of shootings on the border since at least 2013, and rights groups fear that the number of incidents has increased since European countries, including Britain, began pressing Turkey to curb migration flows towards Europe late last year.

Around 1 million refugees, roughly half of them Syrians, reached Europe from Turkey in the past two years. Turkey has promised to take back all those who reached Greece after 18 March. In recent months it has stopped Syrians refugees in Jordan and Lebanon from flying to Turkey without a visa. Some attribute the crackdown on Turkey’s Syrian border and the implementation of the new visa regime to the EU’s crackdown on arrivals from Turkey.

“EU officials should recognise that their red light for refugees to enter the EU gives Turkey a green light to close its border, exacting a heavy price on war-ravaged asylum seekers with nowhere else to go,” Human Rights Watch said after a previous round of border shootings in March.

A senior Turkish official said Turkey was investigating the latest allegations of shootings but was “unable to independently verify the claims”.

The official added: “Turkey provides humanitarian assistance to displaced persons in northern Syria and follows an open-door policy, which means we admit refugees whose lives are under threat.”

Turkey is building a wall along its southern perimeter, making it harder for Syrians to reach safety. Turkish diplomats say this is due to fears over infiltration by Isis rather than any animosity towards refugees.

Turkey hosts more Syrian refugees – 2.7 million – than the rest of the world combined, and more refugees – around 3 million – than any other country.

Critics say Turkey does not make it easy for refugees on its territory. In legal terms, it treats them as temporary guests rather than as refugees with rights under the terms of the 1951 UN refugee convention.

Despite recent legislative changes, the vast majority of Syrians do not in practice have the right to work in Turkey. Syrian children can nominally go to Turkish schools, but in practice Unicef estimates that 325,000 school-age Syrians are not in education, and many of them are forced to participate in child labour.

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch allege that Turkey has deported some Syrians back to northern Syria, where Isis, Syrian rebels, the Syrian government, an al-Qaida franchise and Kurdish forces are all fighting for territory. Turkey denies the claims.