Hicham El-Ghayati, 17 years old; Abdullah Al-Hafi, 17 years old; Salam Makoh, 22 years old; Mohamed Afasi, 9 years old; Nada Al-Shiba, 14 years old; Marwa Aheithour, 16 years old; Ismail, 16 years old; Omar, 24 years old…
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Social networks have been filling up in recent days with the names of women, men, and children whom their families in Morocco have not found since Thursday and who, they suspect, were part of the more than 60,000 migrants who staged the largest assault on the border of the autonomous city in its entire history, and none of them are among the majority who have been returning after retracing the path to Tarajal.
The call centers of the city’s funeral services are also overwhelmed with calls from Morocco with a common denominator, the search for information about relatives missing since last Thursday. “They don’t stop calling,” the sources consulted indicate.
There are dozens of Moroccan families spreading messages on various platforms with photographs of their missing relatives and, in all, a call for help and a plea, information, a sign that they are alive, and a phone number on the other end holding their breath.
The majority among the missing whose families have issued an SOS are men, and among them, young people, with an average age around 20 years, but there are also minors who have lost track. Like Mariam, who at only 15 years old and according to her family, might have thrown herself into the water last Thursday, who knows if with one of the floatation devices that later flooded the shore, in that human tide that flooded Tarajal beach.
The messages on social media – many of which have been compiled by the local newspaper El Faro de Ceuta – exude desperation, that of families who have not seen their loved ones for days, who tirelessly call phones that are off or out of coverage and who fear the worst news, that those they seek are not on the streets of Ceuta – where several thousand still remain – but in the facilities of the old Military Hospital, where bodies are already accumulating, as seen in the exclusive image from EL MUNDO accompanying this information..
The huge hospital complex, not far from the border with Morocco, is the epicenter these days of the greatest humanitarian tragedy Ceuta has known in its history and one of the most serious recorded in Spain related to the migration phenomenon. Part of its facilities has been transformed into a macro morgue.
Of the 60,000 people (some sources speak of 80,000 or more) who stormed the border between Thursday and Friday, around a hundred have lost their lives, although official figures vary depending on the source.
The Government Delegation in Ceuta confirmed yesterday to EL MUNDO that the number of deaths counted by the central government remains 72, specifying that these are those recovered “in Spanish waters”. But from the Ceuta Government, the figure rises to more than 90.
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The difference is explained, sources from the autonomous city indicated, by the fact that the central government only counts bodies recovered since Thursday, when the great avalanche occurred, while Juan Jesús Vivas’s government counts them from Monday, when they raised the alert due to the increase in irregular entries of migrants swimming through the Tarajal breakwater, a preview of what was to come.
To these deaths must be added another eleven already acknowledged by Moroccan authorities, bringing the total number over a hundred, and no one, not even the central government, rules out that in the coming days more bodies dragged by currents to the shores of Ceuta’s beaches may appear.
All bodies located and rescued in Spanish waters are concentrated in the hastily improvised macro morgue at the Military Hospital, which in 24 hours has installed several refrigerated chambers with panels and compressors capable of housing and preserving the bodies until all can be examined by forensic experts and, in the best case, identified and returned to their families or, otherwise, buried in Ceuta’s Muslim cemetery, where emergency expansion works have already begun this Monday.
A team of six forensic experts – two from the Ceuta Legal Medicine Institute and four reinforcements from the Iberian Peninsula – is working tirelessly to perform autopsies, and more than a dozen have already been carried out, although the forecast, according to sources from this operation, is that it will take between two and three days to complete them all.
At the same time and in parallel, the Guardia Civil’s Criminalistics Service is striving to identify as many mortal victims as possible, using an innovative system, Identisat GC, which allows sending fingerprints instantly via satellite without the need for a mobile phone, greatly speeding up the consultation procedures of databases, especially in Morocco, from where most of the migrants who arrived in the avalanche and also the deceased came.
As a general rule, according to the Guardia Civil, identification is possible with only the fingerprint, but forensic protocols also require genetic confirmation through a DNA test.
For this, sources explained, family cooperation is essential to provide genetic samples that can be compared with those of the bodies stored in the morgue of the Military Hospital, the same families who have been praying for days that the phone rings and on the other end, safe and sound, is their son, nephew, or brother.
Meanwhile, they ask for help, launch a digital SOS, and as the family of El-Tayyeb Al-Mardy emphasizes, “may Allah reward them for their help.”
