Was Morocco complicit in exodus to Ceuta?

0:03Hello to you. Welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from the BBC studios in London. I'm Sean Lay. We begin this hour in Ceuta. The surge there lasted barely 48 hours. During that time, the Spanish Territory, the part of Africa closest to mainland Europe, which measures just 18 and a half square kilometres, saw its population explode from 80 ,000 people to more than 130 ,000. Would-be migrants forced their way through the border fence or swam around it from neighbouring Morocco. Most have already gone back to Morocco, but at least 72 will never leave. They died whilst attempting the crossing by sea.

0:42Throughout the weekend there have been tensions between some residents and the would-be migrants but also between Arab citizens who make up around 40 % of the population and right-wing politicians from the Spanish mainland visiting the territory to protest at the incursion. Let's go live now to Ceuta and the New York Times correspondent Carlos Barragan who's there. Carlos, I think, actually monitoring some demonstrations and counter-demonstration that's been taking place this evening. What's been happening? Yes, I just came from a demonstration organized by a right-wing commentator and activist.

1:21He drew around 1 ,000 people and they supported him, they cheered him, but there were also some counter-protesters who didn't want him there. They accused him of taking advantage of the situation and these people, mainly from Moroccan descent, but obviously residents, they said they were the ones who had cleaned the city. They were the ones who had pushed the migrants out. And after five minutes, this organizer had to leave the demonstration and was escorted out by the police. What have people there been saying to you? I think you've been talking not only to residents, but also to some of the people who came in during the course of the week and also to some of the Spanish soldiers trying to escort them back over the border?

2:07Well, local residents across the ideological lines, they feel abandoned by the government. They don't hold any grudge to the migrants. They think that they've been used by both governments. And, you know, the soldiers and the police officers have been trying to push the Moroccans out. They have been trying to tell them to go to the border in what the authorities called a, quote unquote, voluntary return, even though it's obviously not voluntary. but still you can feel the divisions among the local population who are getting angry at both the right-wing politicians who come to the city to try to take advantage of the situation but also of the national government who they think they haven't attained their pledge.

2:58Right, in terms of how they've handled or protected Ceuta from this kind of large incursion. Yes, exactly because, you know, especially in the outskirts of the city You can still see scores of young Moroccans with no food. Some of them, they are still barefoot and they are there. And if you go to the one beach, you can see hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans. It's still not clear what is going to happen to them. So the situation is still uncertain. And just finally, what were the Spanish soldiers saying to you? Because presumably some of them were deployed quite suddenly to Seyut. Yes, yes. So they had received orders to just encourage the Moroccans to go back to their country.

3:44On Friday and Saturday, we saw them shouting at them. But today they were just conversing with them, trying to convince them to join them and to take them to the border. But it was quite pacific. And one of the soldiers told me that they had received orders to just encourage the migrants to go back home. Carlos Berrigan from The New York Times. Thank you very much both for speaking to us on our early edition and giving us an update tonight. Well, many of the people who tried to enter Ceuta by sea got into difficulties. Susanna, a local nurse, was among those who gave emergency treatment on the beach.

4:22She's been telling NewsHour. We got shocked to see thousands of people crossing through the water. Whole families, father, mother, children under 12 years old, all together, coming out of the water with fear. Without shoes, the whole shore was full of shoes, full of floaties. Every once in a while, they were taken out of the water, dead people. We tried to do the resuscitation to all of them, but most of them were all dead. It was absolutely dramatic. Too many people. It was absolutely overwhelming. We had to get IVs and get fluids because some of them were dehydrated. also with hypothermia. We got some warm fluids and also injuries in their arms, in their foot, giving stitches.

5:32Some of them had to be taken to the hospital because they seemed that they had hit the rocks badly. Women that were pregnant, one of them was rushed to the hospital and she had the babies, two of them. She was pregnant with twins. She had her twins in the hospital. At first, we felt fear because we didn't know these people, what they were going to do. But afterwards, we felt mercy and sadness because all of them felt so disappointed with nothing to do, no place to stay, no place to buy water. In my opinion, people are just looking for a better life and to find jobs and to have their families. And in Morocco, they don't have that opportunity, but Celta doesn't have any opportunities either because we don't have this.

6:32This city is very small. The place where immigrants stay temporarily is absolutely overwhelmed. If you come to Thilta, you're going to be in the streets without anything to do, anything to eat. So please go back to your families, go back to your houses, to your homes. Yesterday night, I was crying because I was thinking of all these people, all the disappointment, the dream that they have that they're going to come to Europe and they're going to have a happy life. That's Susanna, a nurse in Ceuta. Just an update on the death toll. The official figure from the Spanish government is that 72 people died.

7:15The Moroccan government had given their first official toll and they say 11 died trying to reach Ceuta from Morocco. I've been talking to Professor Nando Sigoni. He's director of the Institute for Research into International Migration at the University of Birmingham in the UK. And when we spoke, I asked him what might have caused this sudden dramatic influx of migrants from Morocco into Ceuta. To me, the migration event, the border crisis in Ceuta is unusual, is an extraordinary event for a number of reasons. First of all, the scale and size of the arrival. It's the first time we've seen this kind of numbers.

7:53The previous biggest number of arrival only if in one day it was around 8 ,000 and it was in 2021-22. So here we're talking about five, six times more in one day. The second issue is that Morocco normally does quite strict upstream control so that basically they avoid large concentration of people near the borders. It's quite unusual that in this weekend, we've seen so many people concentrated near the border without much control. That's another unusual element. The third element is that the large majority of the people who were Moroccans, they returned voluntarily back to Morocco. So this may mostly look like it was a kind of an organized mass protest rather than a real migration journey for the majority of the people.

8:42What happened in these circumstances is that there are also other people that live around South and they wait for the opportunity to cross, that they may have joined in this movement. But the large majority was mostly local Moroccans. And this is quite unusual. Do you think this will strengthen some of the political arguments in Spain? Some, particularly on the right in Spanish politics, have been saying, look, you know, Morocco was making some political or diplomatic point and that this could not have happened without the authorities in Morocco somehow being involved. I think there is some truth in it.

9:16I noticed that the Spanish government has been very careful not to blame the Moroccan authorities. They've talked about smuggling mafias, organizing it. They haven't provided any evidence that this is the case. I think that this is an issue in which the Moroccan authorities may have let this happen, let's say, rather even if not actively promoting it, to put pressure on Spain, partly because of diplomatic reason, in response or retaliation for the visit of Sanchez to Algeria and the fact that he discussed the situation of the Western Sahara. Just to be clear for people who maybe haven't followed the details of this.

9:53So, Mr. Sanchez, Spanish Prime Minister, Algeria supports Western Sahara's independence and Western Sahara is a territory that Morocco claims and is responsible for. Yes, and the visit was all just 10 days ago. And what is interesting is that when in 2021, there was the previous episode that I mentioned, the beginning, the 8 ,000 people in one day, was happened just after another visit of the then prime minister to Algeria. And there has been debates around this. So it's not only an issue of migration. Migration and migrants are used almost as a weapon for geopolitics. Just on the question of geopolitics, I think a lot of people listening to this interview and indeed following this story in the last few days will have been surprised to discover that there is part of Spain on the continent of Africa.

10:42Can you explain historically how that has come about? I mean, Spain is in control of two land, two territories in Morocco. One is Ceuta, the other one is Melilla. And these are Spanish enclaves in Moroccan territories. This is a part of almost a colonial heritage and was part of and has been part of the Spanish territory for over 100 years. I think it's under the 25 years. The interesting thing to understand now is that Ceuta, while it's part of Spain, is not part of Schengen. And Schengen is the free movement area around the European Union. And coming back to the point you made before about, you know, feeding into the right-wing narratives, you know, you've seen for some of the attack from the Italian prime ministers, the fact that Italy has closed the Schengen area temporary for a month.

11:25But there is no reason for it because people in Ceuta don't automatically can travel to Spain's mainland and they don't automatically can travel elsewhere in Europe. So in some ways that tells us more about the internal politics of some of the other European countries that have criticised it. I think Prime Minister Maloney in Italy is facing a challenge from a further right party, isn't she, at the moment? And of course, Mr Sanchez has to worry about the politics of the right too, doesn't he? Because he will be facing a general election in the not too distant future. We have seen already that there is a protest and counter protest in Ceuta from people moving from Spain, just particularly right-wing activists trying to mobilise on this issue.

12:07There are two issues that are linked to Italy that has been very vocal at criticising Spain. One is, you know, the attack from the right, in particular from a politician called Banachi that leads the far-right political party that is on the rise at the moment, but also an attempt to return close to Trump. I mean, in the last few months, we've seen Meloni really breaking up with the American president. And in the last few days, we've seen her message and the message from Trump have been very similar in response to Sevta. That's Professor Nanda Sigona at the University of Birmingham in the UK speaking to NewsHour on the BBC World Service

12:58Coming up on NewsHour we'll hear from a rock musician turned child literacy advocate The children who sing with me are from the Chicago public schools and it was one of the most challenging recording sessions I've ever done. From nursery rhymes to jazz, that's US singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant. More on that coming up shortly. Our headlines this hour. Suicide bombers killed at least 14 people outside a police station in northwestern Pakistan. Iran's indicated it's close to a deal with Oman on managing the Strait of Hormuz and two people have been killed in Greece after helicopters tackling wildfires crashed into each other mid-air.

13:35All the news coming up.

14:00I'm Sean Lay at the BBC World Service studios in London. This is NewsHour. The Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has expressed his deepest sorrow after two helicopters fighting wildfires collided mid-air in the west of the country. A Danish pilot and a Greek fire service coordinator were killed. Strong winds made firefighting difficult. Hundreds of personnel had been deployed to prevent fires around Porto Gemeno, a village on the coast, from reaching the western outskirts of Athens. Earlier, meteorologist Theodore Gianmaros told the BBC about the challenges. My country is experiencing very bad fire weather.

14:38We have now this very large wildfire. It tends to be a megafire. We estimate that it has already burned more than 100 ,000 hectares of land. So conditions are very difficult and both crews on the ground and through the air experience all this difficulty in containing this large event. Well, I've been discussing that and also the details of the accident with Helena Smith, who's in Athens, and she gave me the latest. Both of these helicopters were flying in very difficult conditions. There were gale force winds, very poor visibility. and it's still being worked out if one of the helicopters slightly touched the other helicopter or at least flew perilously close as pilots in both of the aircraft tried to sort of deal with the heavy turbulence that these gale force winds were causing.

15:36What do we know about the conditions? We know there have been fatalities but also survivors. Yes. The Civil Protection Ministry in Athens has just produced a statement saying that two survivors, one a British pilot, the other a Greek co-pilot, made an emergency landing, survived, were deemed to be in fairly good health, but as a precaution have been hospitalised. What do we know about the two people who died? It's a real tragedy. The pilot of the helicopter that plunged to the ground and smashed to the ground was a Danish national. His co-pilot, Greek, both of those men sadly did not survive the crash.

16:22bringing the death toll from fires in Greece in a matter of days to five people. This is very brutal in a country that is no stranger to forest fires every summer. Can you tell us about the firefighting operation? Because it's pretty extensive at the moment, isn't it? And partly to try and prevent some of these fires from getting close to the western outskirts of the capital, Athens. That's absolutely right. I mean, overnight, these forest fires have effectively barrelled towards the capital at great speed. They were in a coastal town yesterday. Valiant efforts were made to extinguish them around the popular coastal town of Porto Llamano.

17:09And then the flames overnight literally ripped at lightning speed across the mountain and down towards the sea. and settlements on the west of Athens. And that is why so many firefighters were dispatched to that area. But as I said earlier, visibility has been very poor. Winds are very strong. And that makes extinguishing forest fires from the air a very dangerous business indeed. Hours before this collision, in fact, the Greek Prime Minister, Kipiakos, Missile Attack, he's actually in his weekly address spoke of the difficulties in battling fires when you're up against the force of nature. No matter how much technology, how many top of the range bell helicopters and other aircraft, water dumping aircraft you have, it's just very difficult when there are such winds.

18:12That's Helena Smith reporting from Athens. Welcome back. The BBC has been given exclusive access to the UK's teenage hacker rehab programme CyberChoices. Run by the country's police, its purpose is to steer them away from cybercrime. Our cyber correspondent Joe Tidy has been speaking to young hackers who are on the programme about how they strayed into minor illegal hacking before being caught. Mum was very like, oh, you've got a detective coming to speak to you, you're in a lot of trouble. So sat at the window waiting, in, oh my gosh, who's going to come? How much trouble am I going to be in?

18:48Lucas lives in a picturesque village in Cumbria, in the north-west of England. He was caught twice hacking his school computers to play games and visit blocked websites. You've succeeded in doing something that two, three trained professionals have spent a lot of time trying to stop you doing, really. Challenge? Yeah, that's what I thought it was. It was just a challenge to see if I could. He was 16 when he was first given a warning. Because the teachers don't understand what I've done, they're just going to go off what the IT guys tell them. So if they say, get him out, they'll just kick me out.

19:19But Lucas wasn't expelled or arrested. He was enrolled onto a nationwide programme, steering kids away from illegal hacking. There is a good side to being a tech wizard. Cyber Choices is like Hacker Rehab. It was set up in 2017 and is busier than ever. To improve and use your tech skills. From Spain and Finland to the UK and the US. Teenagers are being arrested for increasingly high profile and harmful hacks. Cyber attacks on supermarkets have left shelves empty. Transport systems have been disrupted. Casinos plunged into chaos. Even nurseries held to ransom. We've got way too many people there.

19:59Paul Foster works for the National Crime Agency and says teenagers falling into cybercrime is a growing problem. Certainly English-speaking Western world individuals that we know are now more active in cybercrime. Young people are engaged with online activity and devices much, much sooner, and therefore they're exposed to the risks not just of the online harms to them, but also their potential to cause really significant damage as a result of those digital skills. I learned the hard way. What I did was illegal. Around 1 ,000 teens and children have now been through the Cyber Choices programme, 200 in the last year alone.

20:35But CyberChoices is voluntary, and sometimes boys refuse to engage. Going to go round this side of the car. Owen Flowers from Warsaw refused to join the course when he was 16. Early this month, he was jailed for five and a half years for hacking transport for London and two US healthcare companies. In another ongoing trial, it was revealed that a teenager who enrolled onto the programme still allegedly went on to offend. We're mindful of the full spectrum of this. So could cyber choices actually be upskilling potential cyber criminals? Paul Foster again. I can understand the argument. It is giving people education, it's giving them insight and it's probably making them more informed.

21:16My fear is though that if we didn't give them something like cyber choices, where would they get that input and where would that input take them? The NCA admits cyber choices can never solve the problem on its own, but the agency says the scheme is working and notes that other countries, including Australia and Canada, have launched their own versions to tackle the issue of young people falling into cybercrime. That was Joe Tidy reporting. You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service with me, Sean Lay. Let's return to our top story. There's been an anti-immigrant demonstration in Spain's North African territory of Ceuta Sunday evening, but also a counter-demo from those accusing politicians of trying to exploit tensions.

21:56It follows the sudden arrival of thousands of people over the border during the week. Many have now left. Joining us now is Albise Pérez. He's a Spanish member of the European Parliament for one of Spain's smaller right-wing parties. On Sunday, he was protesting outside the Moroccan embassy in Spain's capital, Madrid. Mr Pérez, thank you for being with us on News Hour. What was that demonstration outside the Moroccan embassy about? It's a pleasure to hear you. Thank you for inviting me, Mr Sean. Well, the message of the process is very simple. In today's more than 60 ,000 people entered Ceuta.

22:31Ceuta, as you already know, is Spain. It is an European border. More than 50 people died. This was not spontaneous, as you can imagine. This was planned. And I think nobody moved 60 ,000 people without organization. Morocco, in our opinion, is responsible. And I think you cannot use human beings as a weapon. Lassane Haddad, who's a former tourism minister, who's an MP in the Moroccan Parliament, told News Hour early today that there was no evidence that Morocco had done this, and he couldn't see why his country would have done it. Well, look at these three facts, the scale. 60 ,000 people today is one point of the border.

23:09The president in May 2025, I remember, 12 ,000 in two days. The European Parliament condemned Morocco then for that in June 2021. and the results the Spanish army with armoured vehicles had to take back control. Now clearly that didn't happen this time did it? Most of the people seem to have left voluntarily. You were in Ceuta earlier this weekend obviously on the same issue but you met quite a lot of local opposition didn't you and I think had to take refuge in a bar at one point. Well 100 % I feel fear actually you know the violence of thousands of Muslims people with their origin in Morocco trying to attack physically.

23:56Hang on a minute. Let me just be clear about this. I mean, 40 % of the Spanish population of Ceuta are Arab or African in origin. They are locals. So they're entitled to be unhappy about your presence as you are about the presence of these people who came over the border, aren't they? Because they clearly think you'll try to stir up trouble. well that doesn't mean misinformation from all these people actually i i never speak about religion at all i think we can work you did just mention this interview well no no i only say that i receive all this kind of balance from people that literally says to me ceuta is for muslims that's why they introduced the the religion in this debate and it's juicy you already said in this interview well almost all of them already leave celta that's actually not true the people of celta today are living in fear it should be safe and this is not families today are locked in their homes it is the spanish authorities who say that most of people the spanish interior ministry says most have left it and that's been confirmed by reporters on the ground they say there is a group of about i think 400 who are still on the beach some of those may not be moroccan they may be sub-saharan africans yeah that's why i'm so angry with the Spanish government because I sent all my team there.

25:18I was there 15 hours from now, and I can tell you that's not truth. There's still a big problem with illegal immigration in the streets of Celta. Let me ask you finally, we've only got about 30 or 40 seconds, what do you think the Spanish government should do now? Well, right now, three things, very simple. One, not one euro more from Europe to Morocco until the pressure stops. to the army and Frontex at the Ceuta border permanently and three, European Parliament investigation into immigration used as a weapon. Albisa Perez, Spanish member of the European Parliament, thanks very much for talking to us here on NewsHour about the events over the last few days in Ceuta.

26:02As well as answers, scientific research often throws up fresh questions. So it is for a team at the Centre for Paleogenetics in Sweden who've been examining the bones and DNA from woolly mammoths, an ancestor of the Asian elephant. Their research suggests that hunters were more likely to kill the female, which begs the question, why? I've been speaking to Hannah Mutz, an archaeogeneticist from the team. And we studied 11 different accumulation sites. These are sites that sort of during the last ice age, northern Europe was covered in glaciers. And then south of that, there were these communities that were relying really heavily on mammoths.

26:40And so we have these sites. One is Krakow's Fagista, which is in Poland. And it's this hill that's rising above the river plain. And archaeologists have excavated and found layer upon layer of mammoth bones, over 100 of them, which is pretty cool. And we were interested in looking at the demographics of these mammoths to see if we could get a better understanding of what was happening here. Is this related to humans hunting the mammoths? We extracted ancient DNA from these bones to get a sense of the mammoths that were there. So this was a site of human habitation. And in a sense, this was almost like the butcher's cast offs, as it were.

27:17Yeah, although it had been hotly debated because, I mean, mammoths are very difficult to transport. And so some people were saying maybe this was some sort of natural trap. Now, the results are fascinating because presumably from the DNA you extracted, you established that a lot of these bones were from female mammoths. Yeah, absolutely. At the sites that were associated with hunting, We compared those also with mammoth remains that were found dispersed in the landscape that didn't have signs of anthropogenic either hunting, scavenging or butchering. And we found that at the accumulation sites, they were mostly females.

27:48And then at these dispersed contexts, they were mostly males. And have you had any thoughts as to why the disproportionate number at this location where the bones were female mammoths? It was really fun to think about this question. Perhaps they moved more predictably, which modern elephants also do. And that's because essentially you have this herd structure where females are leading the herds. They also have calves with them. So they're a little more constrained. Yeah. And they need to find predictable sources of food and water. So if humans kind of twigged that this was a place where you could get a significant number of mammoths all together, they just happened to be female, but they were kind of accessible.

28:30that might have been a reason for them to be to all have ended up killing the females more than the males. Absolutely and mammoths were very important to these people I mean not only would they have been used for meat and for hides but also the bones were used in building structures the ivory was used for making art as well so they were really important to these people yeah so making sure they had access I think was a yeah a big part of it. How do we think they were killed? It's hard to know there's been a bunch of theories everything from sort of holes dug in the ground. But finding the spears indicates that people maybe were like the spear points embedded in the bones indicates that maybe people were, you know, directly hunting them.