The mass invasion of illegals from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta late last month allegedly coincided with at least five young girls being raped.
According to a report from the local El Pueblo de Ceuta newspaper, the University Hospital of Ceuta (HUCE) treated at least five girls under the age of 14 years old after they were apparently raped.
The girls are believed to have come to the Spanish territory during the coordinated storming of the border by around 72,000 migrants within a 24-hour period on the final day of July.
While Spanish authorities claimed to have returned around 70,000 back to Morocco within days of the invasion, local reports indicated that thousands more likely remained in the city.
This was particularly true of migrants under the age of 18, as unaccompanied minors typically have a better chance of being granted asylum in EU countries. However, given the small city’s limited capacity to house migrants, many were left in a vulnerable position, apparently including the young girls in question.
An emergency doctor at Ceuta University Hospital, Susana Ascaso, confirmed that her hospital had dealt with multiple cases of migrant girls allegedly being raped. She said that there have been “cases of rape of migrant girls,” who were living on the streets of the city “because there isn’t enough room for them in the children’s shelters.”
“It’s not that they don’t want to help them, but rather that there isn’t enough space for them,” Ascaso asserted. “The population that has arrived is mostly made up of young, strong adults. Therefore, we are having many problems.”
The emergency room doctor said on the day of the invasion, her hospital was overwhelmed by migrants seeking medical attention for injuries caused “by the border fences, wounds from rocks in the sea, and shoulder dislocations.”
In total, nearly 100 migrants are believed to have drowned while making the short sea crossing from Morocco to Ceuta during the 24-hour influx.
Despite nearly two weeks elapsing since the invasion, Ascaso said that the number of migrants being treated in her hospital has only increased. She said that “patients are arriving with diseases that have the potential to become epidemics.”
“We don’t know if people are arriving with tuberculosis, hepatitis, or other types of diseases that, as of today, we also won’t be able to detect,” she said. “These are health risks for our population that we are assuming and that we cannot control. In the future, we will be able to know if all this has had consequences for the population.”
The reports of alleged child rape came as thousands of Ceuta residents took to the streets over the weekend for a bipartisan and cross-faith demonstration to demand that the socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the European Union protect them from further migrant invasions. In total, around nine residents of the Spanish-controlled area of North Africa joined the protest calling for better border controls.
The mass influx of migrants from Morocco came in the wake of a Spanish Supreme Court decision in June, which found that authorities could not immediately return migrants who arrived by water. This created a legal loophole in the case of Ceuta, as migrants could simply walk out to sea on the Moroccan side of the border and technically arrive by water in Spanish territory just meters down the coastline.
It also came in the wake of the leftist government in Madrid embarking on a mass amnesty scheme for illegals living in Spain, which looks to regularise upwards of a million illegals this year. Critics warned that such a programme would serve as another pull factor for prospective illegals looking to reach EU land.
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