Moroccan witnesses testify on mass migrant entry into Ceuta, Digi Mart USA News: The judge investigating the mass arrival of migrants in Ceuta, María Tardón, has taken statements from four Moroccans who entered the Spanish autonomous city at the end of July and who appeared as protected witnesses. The testimony was given before the National High Court.
Two of them told the judge that they saw Moroccan police officers and members of the auxiliary forces giving directions for reaching Ceuta by the beach and the breakwater. One said he witnessed this on July 31, the second day of mass crossings, when he returned to Morocco to pick up his brother.
One witness explained what led him to cross the border. According to social media, he had heard that “Pedro Sánchez would regularize everyone who entered” the city.
He added that a friend had told him that controls in the border area were very lax.
That account matches the testimony of another witness, who said that on his route to the Spanish city he saw many small buses, trucks and taxis carrying people toward the border. It was the morning of July 30, the first of the two days of mass crossings.
He did not see any checkpoint until the area near Tarajal, according to sources familiar with the testimony. The witness could not say who was organizing the transfers or whether people were paying for them.
Another witness said that once in the city he heard other Moroccans say that a Moroccan soldier was staying at the shelter where they were housed and that a gendarme was in another communal lodging. Earlier, four other migrants had testified before Judge Tardón, including one who said he had been a gendarme and who, like the others, identified security officials in Rabat near the border.
On Tuesday, witnesses also identified police commanders and officials such as the mkadam, municipal employees who report on events and whom the witnesses also call informants or snitches. The National High Court judge is seeking to clarify both the circumstances of the mass entry into Ceuta and the response of Spanish authorities to warnings about what could happen.
