Spanish counterterrorism officers have reportedly identified at least ten people previously expelled for jihadism among the 72,000 migrants who breached Ceuta last week. The report has raised existing concerns over whether any of them reached mainland Spain and disappeared into the Schengen area.
El Español reported that specialists from the National Police’s General Information Commissariat and the Civil Guard’s Intelligence Headquarters recognized the jihadists while reviewing border-camera footage, news footage and social-media videos. The newspaper said they had previously been investigated, detained and expelled to Morocco over jihadism and could be among the several thousand people still in Ceuta. Their present whereabouts have not been disclosed.
After the crisis broke on Thursday last week, the Interior Ministry initially said about 50,000 people had entered and 48,300 had returned to Morocco within 48 hours. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska later revised the total to 72,000, saying approximately 70,000 had left. Ceuta’s Mayor-President Juan Jesús Vivas has placed the number of invading illegal migrants at around 80,000 and estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 remained.
‘Europa Sur reported around 50 migrants escaping from Ceuta to the Campo de Gibraltar by speedboat and jet ski’
On Saturday, 22 of the EU’s 27 governments demanded coordinated action to protect the bloc’s external borders and condemned Pedro Sánchez’s migration policy—which was a confirmed pull factor, although indirectly through a social-media disinformation operation targeting Moroccans—while Italy restored checks for one month on non-EU nationals arriving from Spain by air and sea. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called the measure necessary to ‘safeguard national security’. Denmark and Italy also pressed for emergency EU talks on stronger borders, faster returns and external asylum-processing centres.
Ceuta is a Spanish enclave in North Africa and EU territory but lies outside the core passport-free Schengen area. Travellers leaving for mainland Spain normally face additional identity checks. Madrid therefore insisted that the crisis had not compromised Schengen and told EU ministers there had been ‘no onward movement’ to the peninsula.
Local reporting, however, contradicts Sánchez. Europa Sur reported around 50 migrants escaping from Ceuta to the Campo de Gibraltar by speedboat and jet ski, reaching the beaches near Algeciras and La Línea between Saturday and Monday. In one landing near Punta Carnero, a boat carrying an estimated 15 to 20 people was found abandoned and none of its passengers was located. Other groups dispersed inland before police arrived.
While there is no confirmation that any of the identified jihadists were among those who reached the mainland, the broader picture is becoming increasingly concerning, with the possibility now real that some of them may have entered the Schengen area.
Ceuta has faced this fear before. After more than 8,000 people entered during the May 2021 crisis, reports claimed that Syrian jihadists had infiltrated the enclave. The government delegate in Ceuta dismissed the allegation as a ‘malicious hoax’.
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