Some 2,000 refugees and migrants have arrived at Spain's North African enclave Melilla to cross the border and over 500 managed to enter a border control area after cutting a fence with shears.
The death toll following a mass attempt by a huge crowd of African refugees and migrants to cross from Morocco into Spain's Melilla enclave climbed to 18, according to a new Moroccan update.
Some 2,000 refugees and migrants approached Melilla at dawn on Friday and over 500 managed to enter a border control area after cutting a fence with shears, the Spanish government's local delegation said in a statement.
Moroccan officials said late Friday that 13 of them had died of their injuries sustained in the incursion, in addition to five who were confirmed dead earlier in the day.
"Some fell from the top of the barrier" separating the two sides, a Moroccan official said, adding that 140 security personnel and 76 refugees and migrants were injured during the attempt to cross.
It was the first such mass incursion since Spain and Morocco mended diplomatic relations last month.
The Spanish government's local delegation said only that 49 Spanish police officers were lightly injured.
Morocco had deployed a "large" number of forces to try to repel the assault on the border, who "cooperated actively" with Spain's security forces, it said earlier in a statement.
Images on Spanish media showed exhausted people laying on the pavement in Melilla, some with bloodied hands and torn clothes.
Speaking in Brussels, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez condemned the "violent assault" which he blamed on "mafias who traffic in human beings".
Crossing point
Melilla and Ceuta, Spain's other tiny North African enclave, have the European Union's only land borders with Africa, making them attractive for crossings.
On Thursday night arrivals and security forces "clashed" on the Moroccan side of the border, Omar Naji of Moroccan rights group AMDH told AFP.
Several of them were hospitalised in Nador, he added.
In March this year, Spain ended a year-long diplomatic crisis by backing Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara going back on its decades-long stance of neutrality.
Sanchez then visited Rabat, and the two governments hailed a "new stage" in relations.
The row began when Madrid allowed Brahim Ghali, leader of Western Sahara's pro-independence Polisario Front, to be treated for Covid-19 in a Spanish hospital in April 2021.
A month later, some 10,000 refugees and migrants surged across the Moroccan border into Spain's Ceuta enclave as border guards looked the other way, in what was widely seen as a punitive gesture by Rabat.
source ; trt and world
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