Marrakech – Authorities in the occupied city of Ceuta began burying migrants who died trying to reach it from Morocco, laying 18 men to rest on Friday afternoon in the Sidi Embarek Muslim cemetery. The burials followed the mass arrival at the end of July that killed dozens and pushed more than 72,000 people into the enclave.
Each body was buried unnamed in a numbered grave, which interim cemetery director Said Mohammed told the Associated Press (AP) would allow the remains to be located if relatives later came forward to claim them.
According to Spanish media, the men were buried by Islamic rite, laid on their right side with their faces turned toward Mecca. El País traced the dead to the crush at the border breakwater on July 30 and 31, which left 82 people dead, all men except one woman.
Health councilor Nabila Benzina told the paper that nine of the deceased had been identified, yet Morocco was not accepting their return to their families. “The reasons are not known. The funeral home has tried twice,” she explained, adding that some relatives had traveled to hold a wake but could not bury their loved ones at home.
The operation strained the enclave’s only Muslim cemetery, which averages about 20 funerals a month. “We have summoned all staff,” Benzina told El País. “We have never done anything like this.” Six gravediggers in coveralls, gloves, and masks worked through the humid heat, lowering white funeral bags into a cement-walled trench as imams from the city’s mosques prayed.
Navil Rahal, a city councilman and former gravedigger, described the ritual: “They all go the same, they have been shrouded, prayed for. There are no rich, no poor.” Workers then sealed the bodies with clay bricks, covered them with sand, and sprayed water to hold down the dust.
Burials began only after weeks in an improvised morgue. Telecinco reported that the 82 bodies had been held on the grounds of the former Military Hospital, with interment starting because of Morocco’s refusal and the advanced decay of the remains.
elDiario.es counted the identified bodies differently, at six, with a seventh matched after the man died at the University Hospital. The outlet said that the 18 new graves were numbered 5,412 through 5,430, and noted that the Sidi Embarek cemetery already holds many unnamed graves, hundreds or even thousands, belonging to migrants who died at sea trying to reach the city from Morocco.
A Ceuta government spokesperson stated last week that repatriation procedures were complete but that Morocco had not accepted them, while the Moroccan Foreign Ministry did not answer questions from the Associated Press (AP). More burials are expected through the weekend. “The moment we can no longer hold, we’ll have to inhume them,” Benzina told El País.
As the burials proceeded, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) pressed for them to stop. In a statement from its central bureau in Rabat on Thursday, the group warned that interring the bodies before identification, and before letting families claim them, would amount to “a new human tragedy” added to “the disaster of displacement” and its missing and dead. Human dignity, it noted, is protected in life and after death.
The association sent an urgent letter to the minister of foreign affairs, calling for immediate intervention to halt any burial, extend identification deadlines, and deploy DNA testing to match victims with their families.
It urged the ministry to ensure “the bodies are returned to the families so they can be buried with dignity” through diplomatic and consular channels, with transparent communication opened to relatives.
Copies went to the Ministry of Justice, the National Human Rights Council (CNDH), and the Interministerial Delegation for Human Rights. Morocco’s responsibility, the AMDH argued, does not end at its borders.
Read also: Spain to Send Health Delegation to Ceuta Next Week to Assess Migration Impact
