In the streets of the Moroccan city of Fnideq (Castillejos), there are scenes of tension this Sunday night with clashes between Moroccan riot police and groups of young people who responded to the call to cross the city of Ceuta, some of whom managed to reach the border area to be arrested by the authorities of this Maghreb country.
According to EFE, in the streets of Castillejos, clashes took place between agents and young people around 8:00 p.m. (GMT+1) near a roundabout located one kilometer from the border post. They are young people, mostly Moroccan minors, who responded to the call made in recent days on social networks to access the city of Ceuta en masse.
The authorities, who arrested several of them, identified at this point in the city near the border anyone who tried to continue towards Ceuta and urged those who did not have a valid reason to go there to return home.
In the kilometer that separates the road between this roundabout and the border post, one can see numerous stones on the ground and paving stones torn from the edges of the sidewalks, witnesses of the clashes that took place in the afternoon.
Some of these young people managed to reach the area of the Tarajal Pass – protected by the Moroccan police – through the adjacent hills, but the Moroccan authorities prevented them from going further and arrested them. Once arrested, the agents took them to a building to take them on buses and move them away from the area.
During the day, the young people tried to access Spain several times, the first in the morning, when between 300 and 400 Moroccans and sub-Saharans tried to do so through the area known as Finca Berrocal, according to Spanish authorities.
The second occurred in the afternoon, when a group of about 150 people tried to reach the fence in the area known as Sidi Ibrahim, an intermediate part of the 8.2-kilometer land border that separates the city from Morocco. In addition, a group of about 30 migrants tried to swim across. Only one young man managed to swim to Ceuta from Morocco, according to the same sources.
Coinciding with the concentration of migrants near the border, the lifeless body of a young Moroccan appeared this Sunday on a beach in Fnideq, possibly drowned after trying to swim to Ceuta, Moroccan security sources informed EFE.
So far, Morocco has not provided any data on the force deployed at the border (there are around fifty agents at the border point alone), nor on the number of people arrested between this Saturday and this Sunday trying to enter Ceuta.
