Confusion over who fired shots at immigrants
Spanish and Moroccan officials had no comment on reports today that their respective security forces were responsible for shooting at five immigrants who were killed when hundreds rushed a barrier at one of its two enclaves on the northern Morocco coast.
“There is no comment for the moment. There is an investigation and we’re awaiting the forensic report. Until we get that it would be a mistake to say anything,” said a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Ceuta, where the border charge took place yesterday.
“What the ministry confirms is that the (Spanish) Civil Guard only used anti-riot material,” he said, meaning rubber bullet and tear gas, not live ammunition.
Calls to Moroccan officials for comment today went unanswered.
However, the official Moroccan MAP news agency, citing official and hospital sources, said that the victims were hit by both real and rubber bullets fired by Spanish guards.
“The Spanish Civil Guard fired in the direction of the assailants, a few of whom got stuck on the barbed wire, which led to the death of four illegals,” MAP said. It said Morocco caught 150 people – from Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Congo and Ivory Coast – and will repatriate them.
In the charge, hundreds of African immigrants scaled barbed-wire fences in a bid to make it to Spanish territory.
Earlier in the week, there had been several similar attempts at Melilla, Spain’s other enclave. In recent years, thousands of sub-Saharan Africans fleeing poverty have travelled to Morocco in the hope of crossing into Spain. Most of them live in hills close to the borders.
Ceuta and Melilla, parts of Spain for centuries, are Europe’s only borders with the African continent.
MAP quoted Abdourahman Fadiga, a Guinean, and Sidoukou Saradi, a Senegalese, as saying that security forces did not fire at them.
The agency said the mass assault was prompted by immigrants’ fears about the approach of winter and because the arrival of police reinforcements in the region made them fear arrest.
But Spain’s leading daily El Pais and other media said all five bodies, two found on Spanish territory and three on the Moroccan side, had gunshot wounds that Spanish police alleged came from bullets fired by Moroccan security forces.
“I only thought of running, and that’s what I did without looking back,” Osmauro Muri, an immigrant who took part in the stampede, told El Pais. “I heard shots, many shots.”
Both governments pledged at a summit yesterday in Spain to conduct a joint investigation into the deaths.
Spain has reinforced the borders of its Ceuta and Melilla enclaves. Morocco said Friday it had mobilised about 1,300 security forces in a sweep of illegal immigrants around Melilla that finished with 259 arrests.
They said it was their eighth such sweep this month, having caught 1,500 in all.
Some 5,483 illegals have been arrested in the Nador region this year, mostly people from Mali, Cameroon and Senegal, according to MAP.
Those arrested were taken in buses to the Algerian border, through which they were thought to have passed to get to Morocco.
Both enclaves were reportedly calm today.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s political opponents contend the recent charges were instigated by Morocco, which claims both Ceuta and Melilla, perhaps to put pressure on Spain at yesterday’s summit.
The opposition Popular Party says Zapatero’s Socialist government is in part to blame, arguing that an amnesty it pus edthrough Parliament this year for thousands of undocumented foreigners was luring many Africans in the mistaken belief that they could get papers.
Besides trying to enter Ceuta and Melilla, thousands of people – Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans – cross from Morocco to Spain’s mainland packed into small boats in a bid to enter Europe undetected. Many drown in the attempt. Most of those caught are deported.
“There is an immediate problem which has claimed eight mortal victims in a month and which demands urgent solutions,” El Pais said in an editorial.
“But there is a more serious problem which can only be resolved over the long term which is the economic inequality between the African and European continents which turns the two Spanish cities in northern Africa into funnels for immigration,” the paper said.
