Marrakech – Authorities in occupied Ceuta have now buried 42 bodies at the Sidi Embarek cemetery, all of them young men who died in the mass crossings of July 30 and 31, according to El Faro de Ceuta. The latest 12 victims were laid to rest on Sunday afternoon, in the third round of burials since Friday. They were placed in graves 5439 through 5446.
The dead were recovered by Guardia Civil agents in the waters off Ceuta and held for weeks in the morgue of the military hospital. All are reportedly Moroccan and remain unidentified.
El Faro reports that the toll could reach nearly 90, a scale without precedent in the enclave. Each body has been marked with a number and placed in a specific grave so it can be located should a family come forward.
Nine other bodies have been identified through fingerprints and DNA, backed by complete judicial files, yet Rabat has not accepted their return. According to El Faro, Moroccan authorities went as far as ordering a hearse to turn back with a coffin still inside.
Morocco’s Justice Minister Abdellatif Ouahbi rejected the charge that his country is refusing its dead. Rabat “cannot receive the bodies without knowing who they are,” he argued in a Saturday interview with Al Arabiya and Al Hadath, adding that Spain had not handed over the medical files needed to confirm identities.
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While acknowledging that Rabat and Madrid had yet to reach an understanding on the issue, he voiced confidence that two “friendly states” would soon find a solution. “We do not separate between the dead and the living,” he told the channels. “We want them all.” El Faro disputes his account, maintaining that the nine are fully documented and their families already informed.
Ouahbi tied the bodies to the wider standoff over minors. Rabat, he maintained, is ready to take back Moroccan children and send buses to Ceuta to transport them, and he questioned why the two files are handled separately. He pressed Madrid for “clarity” and for actions that match its words, while warning that “the security solution is not sustainable.”
The minister also defended how Morocco managed the July surge, when roughly 70,000 people moved toward the city from Fnideq. Had the authorities confronted the crowds, he contended, “we would have faced many young Moroccan victims.” Some youths, he noted, considered Ceuta Moroccan and believed they were moving inside their own country.
The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) has pushed for the burials to stop. Citing the readiness of Ceuta’s authorities to inter 82 bodies, the group warned that proceeding without full identification “would constitute a new humanitarian catastrophe.”
It recalled that “human dignity is protected in life and after death,” and that families hold the right to know the fate of their relatives.
The association sent an urgent letter to the Foreign Ministry demanding DNA testing, extended deadlines, and the return of the bodies. Rabat’s responsibility, it argued, “does not stop at the national borders.”
