Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is facing new questions after a Spanish police intelligence report reportedly concluded that Moroccan security personnel actively helped direct a massive influx of migrants into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta — contradicting Sánchez’s public claims just days earlier that there was no indication of Moroccan involvement.
According to the report from Spain’s National Unit for Combating Immigration, known as CENIF, uniformed Moroccan security personnel were seen providing migrants with instructions on how to cross the border, while plainclothes agents allegedly supervised the operation. Approximately 72,000 migrants entered Ceuta from Morocco during the massive surge at the end of July.
Spanish authorities reportedly believe the influx was not spontaneous but rather a planned and organized operation intended to overwhelm Spanish border crossings amid political tensions and Moroccan territorial claims.
The findings come just days after Sánchez accused networks linked to Israel and Russia of spreading disinformation surrounding the Ceuta crisis. Sánchez also insisted that Spanish intelligence services had found no evidence that Moroccan authorities were involved and praised Morocco for cooperating with Spain.
The new report further revealed that Spanish intelligence services issued two warnings to the Interior Ministry two days before the mass influx, warning of an extremely high risk of migrants attempting to enter Ceuta by both land and sea.
The revelations have also placed Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska under scrutiny after he repeatedly denied that such advance intelligence warnings existed. Defense Minister Margarita Robles, however, confirmed that military intelligence and Spain’s CNI intelligence agency had detected calls for migrants to cross the border and passed that information to security officials before the crisis erupted.
Spanish police have now forwarded the information to the judiciary to support a new criminal investigation into the events, while opposition figures are demanding answers over the discrepancy between the intelligence findings and the government’s public statements.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
