«They themselves were the ones who warned about what was happening, they themselves alerted when they realized what the boy had done… The migrants themselves beat him up, and then the National Police arrived and took him away. It has to be told, because [the authorities] are keeping everything quiet».
That is how it was, according to what EL MUNDO has gathered from eyewitnesses, the arrest on Monday afternoon in Ceuta of an unaccompanied foreign minor (mena in the sector’s technical jargon), 17 years old and of Maghreb ethnicity, for allegedly having sexually assaulted four others much younger: specifically, two boys and two girls between 10 and 11 years old, inside one of the centers set up in the El Príncipe neighborhood, where they were all housed after arriving at the place in the avalanche that broke the border between Spain and Morocco on July 30 and 31.
The young detainee, about whom no further information has been released, is currently deprived of liberty in the Punta Blanca juvenile detention center, in the autonomous city, and the facts are being investigated by the Family and Women’s Assistance Unit (UFAM) of the National Police of Ceuta.
The alleged sexual assaults would have taken place in the first two weeks after the border jump of about 80,000 people, and precisely in one of the centers set up by the autonomous city itself for the stay of unaccompanied foreign minors, the so-called Centro Piniers, in the popular El Príncipe neighborhood, where much of the Muslim population of the autonomous city is concentrated.
The facility was open years ago dedicated to this task, but remained closed until just over a month ago when the city was flooded with new immigrants – the number of minors arriving in this jump would range between 1,500 and 4,000, depending on the source -.
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The number of victims of the alleged sexual assaults by the detainee is nevertheless open, police sources point out. It is believed that the young man could have assaulted more minors in the complete chaos that has engulfed the city of Ceuta for more than a month now, with about 9,000 migrants in deplorable conditions and law enforcement unable to control them.
The news of the arrest, first reported by the newspaper Abc and confirmed by EL MUNDO, spread like wildfire among the resource’s own workers, who share with a majority of Ceutans their fatigue over the city’s situation and the fact that the sexual assaults that have been reported for a month in the place, linked to the presence of immigrants, do not come to light: “They are keeping everything quiet, the authorities do not inform about what is happening,” sources close to the center told this newspaper.
The General Council of the Judiciary has commissioned reinforcements in the Gender Violence courts of Ceuta due to the increase in cases reaching the courts in recent weeks, and the Prosecutor’s Office has raised its voice about this increase, denounced from the beginning by the Ceuta mayor-president, Juan Jesús Vivas, who has repeated since the start of this crisis that Ceuta women have been “self-confined out of fear” for more than a month.
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