Spain’s spy agency warned of plans to storm Ceuta before mass migrant crossing, documents show

By Emma Pinedo, Jesús Aguado and Victoria Waldersee

MADRID, Sept 9 (Reuters) – Spanish intelligence services warned their Moroccan counterparts and Madrid of migrants’ plans to storm Ceuta a day before more than 70,000 people crossed into Spain’s North African enclave, according to documents released by the government on Wednesday.

In a July 29 note to the Moroccan intelligence agencies DGST and DGED, Spain’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Centre (CNI), warned of plans on social media platforms for migrants to enter Ceuta by scaling the border fence or swimming around it, taking advantage of Morocco’s annual Throne Day celebrations.

On the same day, the CNI also warned the Spanish government’s representative in Ceuta of the plans, according to declassified WhatsApp messages.

“There are two different groups with a total of 180,000 followers. Just to give you an idea of the scale,” the CNI wrote in reference to the size of the social media groups.

The Moroccan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Six weeks after the surge in which NGOs estimate 140 people died, more than 10,000 migrants, including unaccompanied minors, remain in Ceuta, living in makeshift camps or on the enclave’s streets and beaches, according to local authorities, fuelling near-daily protests by residents angry at the Spanish government’s handling of the crisis.

The release of the documents is likely to intensify scrutiny of the operational decisions taken in the hours before the crossing and whether sufficient measures were put in place to prevent it. 

NO WARNING OF THE SCALE

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares, however, said the documents showed there had been no warning of the scale of the July 30 migrant surge.

“I am speaking as Spain’s foreign minister, within my remit and based on what I experienced that day. I was not aware of any information of any kind pointing to the magnitude of the avalanche,” Albares told reporters on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez last week said Spain had found no evidence to conclude that the border rush in July from Morocco into Ceuta was orchestrated by Moroccan authorities, contradicting allegations by Spanish police in a report.

Spain’s Interior Ministry, however, reported passivity among the Moroccan border police on the day of the crossing, which it said had been due to reinforce the border with 1,000 extra police and soldiers despite it being a public holiday in Morocco, according to a July 30 report.

“At the operational level, no proactive response from Moroccan authorities was observed regarding the loss of control over the situation, beyond the deployment of a few riot control units,” the Spanish spy agency said in a July 30 note.

In the same note, it said there already were many people on the night of July 29 “waiting to jump into the water to reach Ceuta.”

“The increased presence of Moroccan police and gendarmes proved insufficient to control the crowd, and, that night, several hundred migrants swam across,” it said.

The Spanish government on Wednesday published 40 intelligence reports, alerts and communications related to the Ceuta migration crisis from July 1-31 after Sanchez had pledged to make them public.

They show the situation had been brewing in the week leading up to the mass crossing.

“Since July 25, a migration crisis is developing in Ceuta with the arrival of around 1,700 migrants by sea from Morocco to the autonomous city … the available information indicates that more intrusions are to be expected in the very short-term,” Spain’s defence ministry said in an internal presentation published on July 30, describing the situation on the Moroccan coast near Ceuta as “migratory chaos.” 

(Reporting by Emma Pinedo, Jesus Aguado, Victoria Waldersee and Pietro Lombardi; Additional reporting by Ahmed El Jechtimi; Writing by Charlie Devereux; Editing by Alistair Bell and Paul Simao)