A group of congressional interior commission deputies traveled to Melilla on Monday to learn more about the June 24 border tragedy. After Fernando Grande-Marlasca was given the green light to view the official images, parliamentarians watched several minutes of surveillance footage of the fence-jump four months after the events. They were also aware of the deployment of anti-riot devices used by security forces to prevent the entry of migrants.
“There is no doubt that some of the most important events took place in the area under the operational control of the Spanish security forces and authorities,” said John Iñárritu (EH Bildu), one of the MPs attending the official visit.
Official images are key to understanding what happened on the Spanish side of the border, with Spain being blamed for part of the events in a BBC documentary that has sparked a fresh political storm for the interior minister. The British network notes in its report that a series of images, which have not been broadcast because of their crudeness, show bodies falling on both sides of the border, which the Home Office denies. As the ministry has always maintained, no casualties were killed on Spanish soil that day, and its agents returned no seriously injured. Both in the BBC documentary and in national media publications, the analysis of the published images, compared to the plans of the cadastre and the National Geographic Institute, suggests that some of the events that the Spanish authorities place in the so-called No man’s land It actually happened on Spanish soil.
riot gear
During the visit, MPs held a meeting at the Civil Guard Command, where officials from the armed institute answered their questions, showed some of the pictures and detailed the device activated in response to the jump over the fence. which ended in tragedy.
Agents fired 86 tear gas, 28 smoke canisters, 65 rubber balls, 270 salvos and 41 large tear gas canisters, according to information provided to lawmakers on Monday.
ERC MP Maria Dantas believes that the images they saw at the Civil Guard headquarters were insufficient: “He saw nothing of the massacre. [el momento en el que se produce la avalancha y pueden observarse personas heridas o fallecidas]. We have already seen many pictures. I expected more”, says the parliamentarian. Due to the lack of time to view the records, the MPs requested a few days ago to be able to access all the records at the Parliament headquarters in Madrid. Interior has agreed, but the date is not yet known. “There are pictures of helicopters, drones… showing wounded people and crowds… these are the pictures we’ve been waiting for.
Members of the Interior Commission also visited several border points in the Barrio Chino area where barbed wire was jumped. “We managed to find the places where it is clear in various videos that an avalanche happened and where several inert bodies appeared, we don’t know if they were wounded or dead, in the territory under the control of Spain, St. Spain’s operative zone,” Bildu MP said in front of the fence. “It is time for the Ministry of Internal Affairs to stop giving money, because it is clear that very important events have taken place on the territory of Spain.
Dantas and Iñárritu reiterated that one of the areas where some of the victims lost their lives, described by the interior minister as a “no man’s zone”, is actually located on Spanish soil, as recognized by cadastral documents. “Many migrants were trapped in that area after the door was pulled down. Many did not manage to jump because the avalanche came. In the area where people died, people were shot with gas,” says the ERC deputy.
The parliamentarian claims that he asked the agents about this issue and, as is known, they evaluated the “transit” zone. Another key question about what happened in the Melilla tragedy is why the Spanish civil defense did not enter this side of the border to help the injured migrants.
According to Dantas, members of the armed institute he spoke to said “you couldn’t enter” because “Moroccan agents were already there” and “they allowed the gendarmerie to operate”. After three hours, they entered the place, as the security forces announced during the meeting with the MPs.
For his part, the Minister of the Interior reiterated this Monday that in the tragedy of Melilla “there was no death on Spanish territory”. Grande-Marlasca once again defended the action of the Civil Guard on June 24 during a visit to the works of the new National Police Station in Cuenca.
Regarding the personnel, the minister said that all the records, which have already been handed over to the prosecutor’s office for their investigation, will be delivered to the Internal Affairs Commission after the session at the Congress of Deputies.
Source: El Diario
