From the forest to the caves. The search for sub-saharan migrants by the Moroccan gendarmerie takes place this weekend without pause behind the city of Nador, its agents deployed on the heights of the Gurugú and Uixán mountains. In the first, they are already beaten empty, since there are hardly any men left among their groves. The second is where this Saturday the purge intensifies the most, with the aim of trapping the last of the nearly 2,000 Africans who were waiting for an opportunity to go to Spain.
Moroccan police forces have deployed a strong device shielding the border fence with Melilla, especially in the previously poorly guarded and dangerous passage of the Chinatown, confirm sources from the Civil Guard in the autonomous city. There is also a large number of gendarmes in the mountains, and a little concealed activity of plainclothes policemen, of Information units, in search of collaborators of a local mafia that ruled over migrants and charged them rights to stay and move.
in the Uixan the Moroccan raid is carried out by the abandoned mines between large rocks. Migrants fleeing Gurugú have moved to this other place, which in times of the Spanish protectorate was an iron extraction area. The Compañía Española de Minas del Rif opened the holes in the mountain where the migrants who have not yet been trapped are now desperately hiding. Sub-Saharans look for the holes of abandoned mines, trying to get away from another area of the mountain where Morocco is still extracting ore today.
By bus to the Sahara
The goal is to catch migrants, gather them in dozens and dozens, sign them up and drive them into the lowlands, where Some buses are waiting for them to take them away from Nador. And not a little: according to the sources consulted, there are more than 600 kilometers of route to the south, towards the Sahara. There is no single destination point, nor have they been made public.
The Spanish security forces do know that Morocco is not expelling these migrants to other countries. They include trips to triangle formed by the towns of Tinerhir, Risani and Ouarzazatebelow the Atlas, already in the middle of the desert… and close to Algeria.
So great is the Moroccan deployment that there is a general conviction in Melilla that “there will be no more assaults for at least two months”, bets one of the sources of the Civil Guard consulted. The Spanish forces have received the photos of the arsenal of intervened stakes and hooks by the gendarmes and added to the police report on the tragic and also catastrophic day of June 24, when at least 23 migrants and an unrecognized number of mehanis lost their lives at the foot of the fence.
Ahmed Wanted
The Moroccan police seem to have broken any compromise policy with the local mafia who governed the Gurugú camps. Now those settlements are just big circles of black ash, after the gendarmes have set fire to the shops and utensils of their former residents.
There was a time when the Moroccan police in the area wanted that mafia to keep the migrants quiet. Now he is done with the contemplations. With the disappearance of the settlements disappears for a
Ahmed, the Gurugú mafia leader, is credited with the same nationality as his victims: Sudanese.
weather the benefit of a gang ruled by a character, Ahmed, 35, who reigned over the business of transporting migrants and the collection of a right to stay, for stabling them among the trees, feeding them and organizing them in groups to assault the border fence.
It has only transpired for the moment, and Moroccan prosecutor’s office documents whose content EFE has learned, the first name of the mafia leader and his supposed nationality: Sudanese, the same as that of most of his victims. Deprived of the leadership and organization of the gang, the sub-Saharans captured by the Moroccan police are not showing resistance, according to the same Spanish police sources consulted.
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It was not known this Saturday that Ahmed, now the main objective of the Moroccan police information units in Nador, has appeared. He is credited with a role director on 12 other bishops of the organization in the last assault on the fence.
Those subordinates – the Spanish police call them “pastors” – connected to each other by mobile, led the crowd in groups of a hundred number of people, who had been provided with stakes and, for 50 dirhams (almost five euros), a hook to whoever could pay for it, to scale a fence that was increasingly difficult to climb in almost the entire perimeter of Melilla: above, some inverted combs make it very difficult, almost impossible; and the men desperately trying to gain the territory of Europe have not yet figured out how to save the shiny metal curve from that final hurdle.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.