Spain’s interior minister has asked police to check a report where a government agency blamed Moroccan security forces for July’s mass migrant entry to Ceuta, contradicting Pedro Sánchez’s claims that Moroccan authorities weren’t involved.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Monday that Morocco was not responsible – accusing Israel, Russia and the far right of spreading disinformation about the mass entry of around 70,000 migrants into Ceuta.
But online newspaper El Español reported that Spain’s National Centre for Immigration and Borders (CENIF) said the incident “was guided by Moroccan security forces… with an objective other than migration”.
More specifically, the document attributes the planning and execution of the mass crossing to Moroccan security forces and maintains that the viral rumour of a rare border opening was a ruse to distract from a covert operation guided by Moroccan gendarme police agents, both uniformed and in plainclothes.
A video circulating on social media which shows a Moroccan police officer opening the back of a truck for migrants to get out appears to back such claims, although Spanish fact-checking site Maldita has said the footage was shot 50 kilometres from the border with Ceuta, and that Moroccan police were in fact preventing the migrants from travelling any further.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has written to police chief Francisco Pardo to check on the report’s claims, which CENIF reportedly sent to a judge collecting information on the incident, said ministry sources.
“Any such information should have immediately been made available to the National Security Council… and to other bodies with powers in this field,” the minister said in his letter.
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More than 70,000 migrants entered the small Spanish territory in north Africa on July 30-31, swimming or crossing on foot from neighbouring Morocco in an unprecedented rush that left scores dead.
On Monday, Sánchez told Cadena SER radio that “no intelligence service with which the Spanish government normally cooperates” had suggested “any involvement in one way or another of the Moroccan authorities”.
With additional reporting by The Local Spain’s Alex Dunham.
