In their determination to attribute the worst possible anti-Spain intentions to Morocco, to demonize and dehumanize Moroccan institutions, including the kingdom’s military and security forces, some Spanish journalists have inadvertently ended up contradicting, or at the very least seriously undermining, the account published by El País on October 12. According to that report, Moroccan warships had allegedly “invaded” Ceuta’s territorial waters both during the mass arrival of migrants on July 30 and 31 and in the immediate aftermath of that episode of mass crossings. The news outlet Articulo14 published on October 23 an article by journalists Javier Chicote and Pablo Cambronero accusing Moroccan military personnel of throwing migrants overboard after having rescued them, upon noticing that a Spanish Maritime Rescue vessel was approaching.
The story is essentially based on sweeping, unevidenced claims by “anonymous sources” within Spain’s security forces, yet it was received as Gospel truth and spread like wildfire across Spanish social media. Shortly afterward, Salvamento Marítimo, Spain’s maritime rescue service, which operates under the Ministry of Transport, stepped forward to clarify what had happened. “We saw that there were people in the sea and we rescued them. We did what we had to do,” sources at the Ministry of Transport told RTVE, Spain’s public broadcaster.
The same sources confirmed to RTVE that, on July 30, one of its vessels had rescued Moroccan migrants who were jumping into the water from a Moroccan military vessel. The discrepancy between Salvamento Marítimo’s account and the allegations that Chicote and Cambronero published in Artículo14 is striking. At no point did Salvamento Marítimo state that Moroccan military personnel had thrown migrants into the water as the Spanish vessel approached. If the events had unfolded as Chicote and Cambronero claim in his story for Artículo14, why did Salvamento Marítimo merely explain that it had rescued migrants who were jumping from Moroccan vessels, without confirming that Moroccan military personnel had thrown them into the sea?
Yet an even more revealing detail undermines the hypothesis of the allegedly inhumane conduct of Moroccan military personnel, which Chicote and Cambronero present as an established fact. The authors themselves acknowledge that “the immigrants preferred to be rescued by a Spanish-flagged vessel” because, as they explain, they knew that once picked up by a Spanish vessel, they would be taken to a Spanish port rather than a Moroccan one. “Many must have jumped voluntarily,” Chicote and Cambronero write in the very article accusing Moroccan servicemen of deliberately, cruelly throwing out their own helpless compatriots into the sea. How, then, can the categorical allegation that Moroccan military personnel threw migrants into the water be reconciled with the acknowledgment that “many must have jumped voluntarily” to be rescued by a Spanish vessel?
Why would Moroccan military personnel bother to rescue drowning migrants only to again throw them overboard? If so, one might reasonably ask why they had gone to the trouble of rescuing them in the first place. Or did the migrants themselves, acting on their own calculations and determined to avoid being returned to Morocco, decide to jump into the water in the hope of being picked up by a Spanish vessel?
And if Moroccan military personnel really did “throw” migrants into the sea, how can it be explained that even the Spanish government has no knowledge of such conduct? Both Ángel Víctor Torres, Minister for Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, who exercised overall command during the management of the Ceuta crisis, and Óscar López, Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Administration, stated that they had no knowledge of the alleged incident. Have some Spanish journalists somehow gained access to sensitive information unavailable even to ministers of the Spanish government?
While some journalists can indeed have ways of getting wind of classified information, one of the problems of access journalism has always been that scoops should be taken with caution for at least two reasons. First is the political motive or agenda of the anonymous source.” It’s a well-established fact in political journalism circles that “anonymous” sources are not always reliable. Some may plant a particular piece of information to promote their own political camp, demonize an ideological or political opponent, so simply create some kind of distraction that may get the public to stop paying enough attention to a particular story or development.
Second, and particularly relevant in the case at hand, is some journalists’ tendency to exaggerate, fabricate, or sensationalize for the sake of greater publicity or visibility. From the evidence that has since emerged in this case, we now know that Chicote and Cambronero deliberately gave a sensationalist spin to at least one aspect of the report they published on October 23.
Indeed, shortly after publishing their article, the journalists had to correct a crucial piece of information concerning a purported communication between Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service (Salvamento Marítimo) and the Civil Guard’s Operations Center. Such an instance of fabrication or – if we are being indulgent or understanding – deliberate misreporting exposes any reporter’s lack of journalistic rigor and raises questions about whether their motives go beyond the disinterested reporting of an alleged incident.
In their article, Chicote and Cambronero stated with absolute certainty that Salvamento Marítimo’s communication had been directed to the Civil Guard’s Operations Centre (COS) in Algeciras. However, after the Ministry of the Interior denied having any record of such a communication with the Algeciras COS, they published a second article correcting his earlier account and claiming that the communication had actually taken place between Salvamento Marítimo and the Civil Guard’s COS in Ceuta.
That an article containing such serious accusations against Moroccan military personnel should feature a documentary error of this magnitude raises numerous questions about the credibility of its entire account. When faced with such cases, readers are left to grapple with this question: Why trust anything in a report when it is established that one its key claims was utterly fabricated, or at least excessively deceitful to give the story a direction and implication it would not have had?
And yet, to bolster the credibility of their version of events, Chicote and Cambronero includeed in their second article two purported operational reports from Salvamento Marítimo, the first timestamped 5:38 a.m. and the second 5:47 a.m. on July 30, referring to a request to contact the COS in Ceuta. “It appears that the Moroccan patrol boat is not picking people up and is also throwing those it has on board into the water so that they can be rescued by the SALVAMAR ATRIA rescue vessel,” states one of these reports.
But how can this alleged information, supposedly communicated to the Civil Guard’s COS in Ceuta, be reconciled with the fact that a report dated July 30, the very same day, by the Civil Guard’s Intelligence Headquarters, part of the same institution to which the center that allegedly received the communication belongs, makes no mention whatsoever of an incident of such gravity
Civil guard reports document the Actions of Moroccan Security Forces
More still, what further weakens the claim that Moroccan military patrols reportedly threw migrants from their boats is the July 29 report of the Centro Nacional de Inmigracion y Fronteras, which has decisively established that hundreds of would-be migrants were rescued by both Moroccan and Spanish guards throughout the months of July.
And what ultimately undermines the accusation contained in Chicote and Cambronero’s misleading report is that, in reports submitted to María Tardón, Spain’s own security forces documented, Moroccan forces had intercepted large numbers of migrants attempting to swim to Ceuta throughout July.
In a report dated July 30, the Civil Guard’s Intelligence Headquarters stated that, out of 1,380 attempted entries into Ceuta by swimming, only 253 people succeeded. Although the report does not explicitly establish what happened in every unsuccessful attempt, its description of the mobilization of Moroccan security forces to contain these crossings suggests that, even if not all 1,127 unsuccessful attempts involved migrants intercepted or rescued by Moroccan forces, at least a proportion of them must have involved such interventions.
This hypothesis becomes even more compelling when considered alongside the figures cited by the Civil Guard in the same report: “From 8:00 a.m. on July 28 to 8:00 a.m. on July 29, the figures available to the Civil Guard (still pending official confirmation) were 273 entries by sea and 467 people intercepted by the Moroccan Security Forces (FSM).”
In another report drafted that same day, the Civil Guard’s Intelligence Headquarters stated in unequivocal terms that Moroccan security forces had intercepted 493 migrants out of the 1,109 attempted entries into Ceuta by swimming recorded during the 24-hour period between 8:00 a.m. on July 29 and 8:00 a.m. on July 30. This represented 44.5% of the total. “Therefore, it cannot be concluded that the Moroccan authorities displayed an evident dereliction of duty yesterday,” the report stated.
Routine Naval patrols that challenge the ‘invasion’ narrative
Moreover, the accusation circulated by Artículo14, whose central allegation has not been corroborated by the Ministry of Transport, inadvertently sheds light on another report that has generated considerable controversy over the past two weeks.
This concerns the October 12 story published by El País which, without providing sufficiently precise information about the exact positions of those vessels or the times at which they were operating in the vicinity of Ceua, claimed that Moroccan warships had “invaded” the city’s territorial waters.
Chicote and Cambronero’s allegations and the subsequent clarifications issued by Salvamento Marítimo strengthen the hypothesis that Moroccan patrol vessels were present in those waters on July 30 and 31, at the height of the mass arrival of migrants, precisely to rescue those attempting to reach Ceuta by swimming.
Salvamento Marítimo’s confirmation that some migrants were jumping into the water from Moroccan vessels provides an indication that these vessels were engaged in surveillance, interception, and rescue operations, functions they had routinely performed in the same waters long before the crisis.
It is also significant that the Spanish government did not release any information at the time about an alleged naval incursion and that, when El País published its report on October 12, the government described the incident as an “isolated” occurrence.
This official response lends further weight to the hypothesis that the presence of Moroccan patrol vessels was connected to routine surveillance and rescue operations rather than necessarily constituting a hostile maneuver against Spain.
Indeed, contrary to the narrative that El País and other Spanish media outlets have sought to construct around the presence of Moroccan military vessels, Royal Moroccan Navy patrol operations in the vicinity of Ceuta are neither new nor exceptional. Nor has the mere presence of these vessels historically constituted a source of friction between the two countries.
On the contrary, such deployments are routine and an integral part of bilateral cooperation in maritime surveillance, the prevention of irregular border crossings, and the rescue of migrants. Reports previously published by the Spanish press provide compelling evidence of this longstanding practice.
In December 2024, a Royal Moroccan Navy patrol vessel rescued three people traveling in a makeshift boat bound for Gibraltar in waters near Ceuta. According to Spanish media reports at the time, the intervention of the Royal Moroccan Navy made “the participation of the Civil Guard in the rescue unnecessary.”
In other words, a Moroccan military vessel carried out a rescue operation in the vicinity of Ceuta without its presence being portrayed as a hostile incursion or a threat to Spanish sovereignty. Likewise, according to a report published by the EFE news agency in February 2024, Moroccan authorities had permanently deployed a patrol vessel in the maritime area surrounding Ceuta to prevent migrants from attempting to swim into the city.
These two reports, together with numerous others published in the months and years preceding the crisis, confirm that the presence of Royal Moroccan Navy patrol vessels in waters near Ceuta was an established practice, known to and accepted by both Moroccan and Spanish authorities.
The practice is an essential component of the broader bilateral security cooperation framework underpinning the two countries’ joint efforts to combat irregular migration and prevent human tragedies at sea. And the fact that these Moroccan patrols constitute a routine occurrence was further confirmed on October 14 by the Spanish government’s delegate in Ceuta, David de la Encina.
“There were two patrol boats, one in the northern bay and the other in the southern bay, belonging to the Moroccan Navy,” the delegate said of the July 30-31 crossings. “They normally patrol these areas, and this was a routine patrol.” He also made clear that the Spanish government did not use the term “provocation” to describe the Moroccan naval presence.
Furthermore, in an order dated October 21, Judge María Tardón stated that there was still no objective evidence linking the possible presence of Moroccan naval units to the organization, facilitation, or execution of the mass migrant entry. She nevertheless requested that the Ministry of Defense clarify whether any incursion into Spanish waters had occurred.
These statements are particularly significant because they come from a representative of the Spanish government and concern precisely the days when, according to certain media reports, Morocco had allegedly carried out a naval incursion into Ceuta’s waters.
How can an activity that the government delegate himself describes as a routine patrol be portrayed as an “invasion” or a “provocation”? And why has so much emphasis been placed on the presence of Moroccan vessels without explaining, with equal clarity, the surveillance, prevention, and rescue functions that the Royal Moroccan Navy had been performing in those waters for years?
Chicote’s allegations in his October 23 report for Artículo14 and the subsequent clarifications from Salvamento Marítimo introduce a crucial element that cannot be excluded from any serious analysis of this crisis and its aftermath. Namely, the simple fact is that, far from constituting a show of force against or an invasion of Spain, the presence of Moroccan patrol vessels during the migration crisis had well-documented operational precedents and may have been linked to rescue missions. Paradoxically, and perhaps more importantly, in their obsession with demonizing Morocco and its institutions, some journalists may have inadvertently brought to light evidence that challenges the alarmist narrative constructed around the Moroccan naval presence in the vicinity of Ceuta.
Samir Bennis is the co-founder and publisher of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.
