The police have detected ten Moroccans in Ceuta who had previously been expelled from Spain for Islamist radicalization. According to police sources cited by EL MUNDO, all of them were subject to entry bans into national territory due to their close links to jihadist radicalization processes. The men entered Spain at the end of July, during the mass entry into Ceuta. After identifying them, the police proceeded to expel them from the country and return them to Morocco.
At the same time, the authorities maintain ongoing surveillance of possible profiles linked to violent extremism, as the same sources indicate. Spain has «specific» mechanisms to detect radicalization processes and prevent terrorist threats, and the National Police have carried out numerous operations in recent years against people linked to jihadist organizations or radicalization processes. The existence of these mechanisms is precisely what allowed, in the ten cases detected in Ceuta, to know that the Moroccan immigrants had already been subject to previous actions and could not legally return to Spain. However, the agents highlight the difficulty in carrying out identifications given the exorbitant number of immigrants who entered Spain by breaching the border.
Currently, thousands of them remain in Ceuta, plunging the autonomous city into a difficult-to-manage state of disorder. The police response to carry out identifications and proceed with the expulsion of people who are banned from entering the country for committing crimes continues. In addition, the agents maintain a firm line to guarantee security and pursue any crime or threat on the city streets. In counterterrorism matters, precision is also essential. Overall, the National Police have had to simultaneously face very different tasks: attending to vulnerable people, locating minors, guaranteeing citizen security, investigating crimes, and verifying the identity and administrative status of those remaining in Ceuta. The magnitude of the arrival turns each of these operations into an added challenge for the police forces.
Concern took on a special dimension when information systems alerted that ten men had already been expelled from Spain precisely for security-related reasons. Therefore, one of the priorities of the police services during these weeks has been precisely to verify identities and cross-check information. The National Police is the competent body in terms of document control and checking entry bans at the border, while the Civil Guard performs surveillance and control functions of the border perimeter. In cases where an identity is obtained, consulting databases allows determining if there are court orders, entry bans, records, or alerts requiring immediate action. The enormous scale of the late July entry has multiplied the difficulty. Individual identification becomes much more complex when tens of thousands of people cross a border almost simultaneously, many of them without documentation or without their identity initially being able to be established with certainty. The subsequent work of the Security Forces consists precisely in reconstructing that information and determining the specific situation of each person.
For security officials, the ten detected cases constitute a warning sign. The police sources consulted rule out that these are people detained for preparing an attack or for having recently committed a terrorism crime. They were located because police systems allowed verifying that they had a valid entry ban linked to radicalization processes and, from there, the corresponding measures were executed. The situation in Ceuta has become a constant pressure for the State Security Forces and Corps, which face an increasingly suffocating scenario and are forced to redouble efforts almost daily. The National Police and Civil Guard work at the limit of their capacities. The accumulation of duties and the need to maintain permanent surveillance are causing significant wear among the agents, who are forced to multiply shifts, prolong efforts, and assume a workload far above the usual. In the case of the Police, the pressure is evident in security tasks.
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