Criminal people-smugglers with their own ‘president’ and ‘prime minister’ are training massed bands of African migrants to attack Spain’s borders with Morocco in exchange for money.
Confidential police reports seen by El Pais indicate that the crime gangs are charging migrants £16 ($20) to participate in violent, organised attacks on the border between Morocco and Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on the coast of North Africa.
The police reports suggest the traffickers send out scouts to “inspect the [border] and collect updated information on the security measures implemented by the Spanish and Moroccan security forces,” with bands of migrants sometimes hundreds strong charging the fences where weak points are discovered.
The migrants are trained to take out any border guards who attend by hurling bottles of burning quicklime, battery acid, and human excrement at them — as they did on August 22nd, when more than a hundred men, some draped in European Union flags, breached the fences, injuring seven guards.
Migrants who do not may the £16 fee are not allowed to approach the border.
The number of people arriving in Spain via Ceuta and its sister exclave, Melilla, was already up 130 percent between January and July compared to the same period last year before the recent mass breakthroughs.
Spain has also seen a substantial increase in the number of people arriving by sea — becoming, for the first time since the onset of the migrant crisis in 2015, the number one entry point for illegal migrants in Europe, ahead of both Greece and Italy.
This follows the election of a populist, anti-mass migration coalition government comprised of Matteo Salvini’s League (Lega) and Luigi Di Maio’s Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy at the same time as the installation of a Socialist Party government in Spain, which has a lax attitude towards border controls and insists there is no “mass migration” to their country.
Spain’s new Socialist Party governors have even suggested that “unless [Europe] wants to gradually turn into an ageing continent, we need new blood” — and indicated that this should come from migrants, as “it doesn’t look like this new blood is coming from our capacity to procreate”.
Indeed, far from pledging to increase protection for Spain’s two North African cities, the Socialists have said they will take away the razor wire topping their perimeter fences, so invading migrants do not cut themselves.