AP
Ceuta (Spain)
Spain announced it was installing a 500-meter-long (1,600-foot) containment barrier on the sea border between its North African territory of Ceuta and neighbouring Morocco after between 50,000 and 60,000 migrants breached the frontier earlier this week.
The death toll climbed to 67, including some who drowned and others who were killed in a stampede to cross a breakwater barrier, the Spanish government said Saturday.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez slammed the reaction of some other European Union leaders to the events in Ceuta, saying calls for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s borderless Schengen zone were “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest.”
A handful of exhausted migrants who swam to Ceuta’s urban Tarajal beach Saturday morning were met by soldiers who escorted them back across the border. Spain’s interior ministry says the majority of those who entered the territory have already returned to Morocco.
“We are relentless against those who break the law,” Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told journalists in Ceuta on Saturday.
Questioned how this massive border breach could have happened given the heavy security on both sides of the border and whether Morocco posed a threat to Ceuta, Marlaska defended the government in Rabat.
“The events require an evaluation by Spain and Morocco,” he said. But it was the cooperation with its neighbours that allowed Spain “to reverse the situation in 24 hours.”
“Morocco is not a threat to Ceuta, or to the rest of Spain. It is a reliable partner,” Marlaska emphasised.
The leaders of 22 EU countries called for a coordinated response to the situation in Ceuta.
In a letter to top EU officials, released Saturday by the Danish prime minister’s office, the countries asked the EU’s current Irish presidency to urgently convene an extraordinary videoconference of the bloc’s interior ministers.
“We cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible. That a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into a legal stay,” the letter said. “Such a perception would encourage further attempts, undermine confidence in our common migration policy and have repercussions for all Member States.”
The letter was signed by the leaders of Italy, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Sweden.
