Melilla, a year later: 77 disappeared, contradictory reports and only one identified victim

77 missing people of whom nothing is known. “Imagine a mother, who has already spent a year and does not know where her son is and who is waiting for a call to tell her where he is, that he is fine… It is a terrible impact and violence”. This is explained by Helena Maleno, founder of Caminando Fronteras, one of the five NGOs that has filed a complaint for the Justice to investigate and clarify what happened at the Melilla fence on June 24, 2022..

One year after the greatest tragedy that occurred on the border between Morocco and Spain, many unknowns remain open. The Prosecutor's Office quickly and quickly closed an investigation that exonerated the Spanish authorities of any responsibility, despite the fact that the Ombudsman had detected numerous irregularities in the investigation of the facts.

In search of the truth

The lack of response from the authorities has led the NGO Coordinadora de Barrios, Colectivo Ca-Minando Fronteras, Association of Foreigners in Network, Association for Human Rights of Spain and Associació Lab 38 to seek redress in the courts: “The complaint It is necessary because the experience we have is that there is great impunity for crimes committed in the border area.. You play with outsourcing, the omission of the duty of relief, transnationality… One of the most important things in the 24-J debate has been whether the patio was Spanish or Moroccan. The states play with the creation of a kind of space of non-law that is not legal, but that is accepted in fact, to maintain a terrible impunity”.

The Ministry of the Interior has always maintained that the deaths did not occur in Spanish territory. “There were no deaths in Spain,” Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska came to assure, despite the fact that various journalistic investigations, such as those carried out by the BBC and Lightohouse Reports, show that the Gendarmerie dragged the bodies of the victims from Spanish territory towards moroccan soil. It includes the words of civil guards who confess that the place that Grande-Marlaska called “no man's land” is a Spanish competition. Smir, a 26-year-old survivor from Sudan, affirms on camera that his colleagues “died on the Spanish side”.

“There are a lot of situations that are not clear. Did they let the Moroccan army into an area that is not Spain? The Civil Guard was protecting that area and at the same time, Moroccan soldiers were entering there. A de facto situation occurs that is not clear. It will have to be resolved in court where the events were committed and what criminal acts there could have been,” says Maleno..

The investigations carried out by the Prosecutor's Office and the Ombudsman, in addition to giving contradictory views, do not give any response to the victims. The institution directed by Ángel Gabilondo denounces in its report the inaction of the Civil Guard agents in the face of the avalanche and points out that the agents “threw stones” and “sprayed” the trapped people. “Some Spanish agents look for stones and throw them at the people who are at the top of the fence,” the resolution states, detailing that a civil guard “sprays them with gas so they don't keep trying to break down the door of the post.”.

In addition, the agents are accused of not assisting the injured: “An ambulance stopped at a certain distance from the Civil Guard vehicles is observed on the road (…) that does not intervene at any time”. For Helena Maleno, “That day there was an omission of the duty to help. It has been normalized that when a person jumps a fence they can die. It has been normalized based on impunity. At the borders we are skipping democratic standards. There is a very dangerous political game that places the violation of the human rights of certain groups at the center”.

The Prosecutor's Office closed the case last December, considering that there was no one responsible for the tragedy or evidence of a crime. “It cannot be concluded that the actions of the intervening agents increased the risk to the life and physical integrity of the migrants, so they cannot be charged with a crime of reckless homicide,” he states in his letter.. This same week, during a visit to Melilla, the State Attorney General has stated that he considers the complaint “an appropriate path”: “We are on the path that was expected to occur” and “no further assessment must be made in this regard “..

How many people died?

The number of deaths in the tragedy is another unresolved issue that the victims claim to know. “Officially, there is talk of 23 deceased people. Our organization was able to verify that day 37. And then there were three more people who died in hospitals from their injuries.. At least 40 known fatalities, plus 77 missing persons. There may be more, because the situation of impunity makes it very difficult to build the truth”.

The Kingdom of Morocco has maintained total opacity regarding the autopsies of the deceased, which has made it impossible to identify the victims and for their relatives to watch over them: “At the moment there is only one identified deceased in Morocco who has been buried and a relative came to bury him. Morocco has not provided the information on these autopsies,” explains Maleno.. The unknown remains, therefore, about the causes of death of these people.

The official information is that with the migrants trapped in an interior courtyard, the Moroccan gendarmes fired dozens of tear gas and caused chaos among the people who were trapped, who tried to escape by overcoming the fence that gave them access to Spanish soil.. From the other side, the Spanish soldiers also launched gas. According to the criteria of the Prosecutor's Office, these gases launched by the Civil Guard had no impact on the people detained between the two fences: “There is no record that the use of smoke canisters launched by the Spanish agents produced total invisibility or cases of suffocation among the people there congregated, since it was a completely open courtyard at the top and surrounded by metal fences, so that the entry and exit of air and other gases was completely fluid”.

At one point, the fence fell and caused an avalanche.. Dozens of people were crushed. The pile of bodies spread between the area managed by Morocco and the area that is the responsibility of the Civil Guard. But the Spanish agents allege that they withdrew from the place in response to the attacks they suffered from migrants in their attempt to reach European soil.. They left the responsibility of the intervention to the Moroccan gendarmes. As Helena Maleno explains: “The investigation has to clarify where the events occurred, what was the collaboration between the two states, who is responsible, what happened that day and then, how the people who died died. And the missing persons, who is looking for them, where they are, and the right they have to be searched. So many things for which we don't have an answer because there hasn't been enough research.”.

77 people that no one is looking for

The disappearance of 77 people in any other context would have generated a great social mobilization and pressure on the authorities to clarify where they are.. However, the only thing the families of those disappeared find is silence: “The impact of this violence continues on hundreds of families who are still searching for. They don't know if their family member is dead, if he's buried, they don't know where to look, nobody gives them answers. This is the terrible mourning of the families of the disappeared. Imagine a mother, who has already spent a year and does not know where her son is and who is waiting for a call to tell her where he is, that he is fine… It is a terrible impact and violence. That's why this lawsuit is so important.. We have to give an answer to those families.”.

The difference between this type of disappearance and others is found in what Maleno calls “institutional racism” and which translates into a different way of approaching deaths when the victims are African: “We have created two rights to life. The right to life of the white person and the right to life of other groups. If a small boat sinks, only one plane goes, if a fishing boat sinks, they spend days and days looking for the fishing boat with all means. It has been decided to sacrifice the lives of certain groups, by action or omission”. A situation that reminds him of the one experienced with the Tarajal crisis: “A relative of a victim told me: 'In the white country, where animals are so protected, if a dog jumps into the pool and drowns , someone would jump to pick him up, but my son had no right for anyone to jump into the sea'”.

The situation contrasts with other human avalanches in which there have been fatalities, and with the social sensitivity that existed with the victims at the time: “If this had been like what happened in the Madrid Arena, all the springs would have been put to investigate who They are the victims, what do we know about them, their name, their last name, where they came from, why they got to that fence, what happened the previous days. We must know all this from an impartial investigation that puts the rights of these victims at the center and that is not biased by international racism.”.

The situation of the survivors

For those who managed to escape without dying or “disappearing”, the situation has not been easy.. That same day, the Civil Guard deported 470 people at the border who were prevented from exercising their right to request asylum: “The people did not even have shoes. They had been shot in different areas, on the Algerian border, in the Beni Mellal area, in central Morocco.. with absolutely nothing. Some had arrived, they had been left on those buses lying around and they had been received directly at the hospitals. We found a person with a gunshot wound in one of the hospitals. We accompanied another of the boys who ended up dying in the hospital.. They were in brutal post-traumatic shock. Today, many of the 15-16 year olds are on the streets.. Without assistance, with injuries. If you see them, they have physical situations derived from the mistreatment of that day. Then there are people in jail. People from Sudan, who do not have families who can assist them and who are locked up with jail terms of up to three years”.

What the complaint seeks is to try to provide an answer to the hundreds of victims left by the massacre that occurred in Melilla on July 24, 2023: “If we think of other previous complaints, we do not have much hope. But we cannot stop putting it, for the memory of the victims and the right to truth, justice and reparation. We must continue fighting to break with impunity”.