Amina Saadoun spent Saturday on the road from Ceuta into Morocco, holding up a small photo of her 15-year-old brother to each returning migrant who sloped by. “Have you seen this boy? He’s my brother, I raised him like a son,” she asked.
By Sunday, the death toll from the mass crossing into the Spanish enclave had risen to 72, according to Spanish authorities, leaving Moroccan families bereft or terrified that their children were among the dead.
Saadoun has been searching for her brother Mohammed — shy, scared of lots of things, not interested in studying — since he left home in Tetouan on Thursday morning for the Moroccan border with Ceuta, joining about 60,000 others who surged into the enclave. “I don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” she said, breaking down in tears.
Funerals for people who perished in the swim, including a young girl from Tetouan who loved football, were held in their hometowns around the country over the weekend.
As the stragglers among those who crossed were pushed back into Morocco by Spanish authorities, many were still missing. Their mothers and sisters were wandering the streets near the frontier with photos in hand, moving between police stations and deportation centres along the coast.
Questions swirled about whether the deadly crossing had been triggered as a political ploy while many reckoned with what had left them and their children so vulnerable.
While Spain’s central government has avoided any criticism of the Moroccan authorities, the top official in Ceuta was blunt. Juan Jesús Vivas, president of the city government, said on Antena 3 television: “Our frontier has been mistreated by Morocco. It is impossible for 60,000 people to enter without the approval of the Moroccan government. We have been mistreated and held in contempt.”
Saadoun said her younger brother had been swept up by a culture captivated by emigration. “It was his friends who filled his head with the idea of emigration, and you know the concept of emigration among Moroccans: go make money, buy a house, a car,” she said. “What makes me so sad is to see our country and our youth lost like this.”
The deaths have left a mark even on those who returned.
As Hamza, 23, swam through the tepid water before dawn on Friday, he felt the skin of a corpse brush against his leg. He began swimming faster. Around him were thousands of others, he said. Some did not know how to swim and tried to grab on to those who could.
He eventually reached the shore, after he said Moroccan guards had allowed the group to pass. But he left Ceuta within a day, driven out by hunger and fear of violence.
Waiting with dozens of others on the floor of the train station in Tangier, Hamza said it had been his second attempt to enter the Spanish enclave that week.
Moroccan authorities had caught Hamza swimming on Tuesday and sent him to the southern desert. But when he heard rumours that the border with Ceuta would be open, he rushed back to the frontier.
It was his eighth attempt to leave his home country. He said the idea had been lodged in his mind for years, driven by the hope of finding better-paid work than the £400 a month he earned as an aluminium worker supporting his four siblings and widowed mother.
Many of those who swam were far younger and had never attempted the crossing before. They were swept up in the frenzy after their social media feeds filled with claims that they would not be turned back.
Abdulaal, a 16-year-old boy with thick braces, sold his sneakers to pay for the journey to the frontier after hearing from friends that the Ceuta crossing would be open. Shaken after returning, he wore mismatched rubber slides and said he would not be going back.
For now, Hamza also felt disillusioned. He had heard theories that the border guards’ decision to let migrants pass was part of a larger diplomatic move. He was shaken by the deaths around him. But did not rule out trying again.
Wearing a bandage covering a wound he sustained after climbing a barbed-wire fence, Hamza was among hundreds who were injured. Spanish authorities said Ceuta health workers treated migrants 1,149 times between 9am on Friday and 9am on Sunday.
“It’s like drugs,” Hamza said of emigration. “After you try it, you say you never want to do it again, but then enough time passes and you start thinking about it again.”
The human toll was still becoming clear on Sunday, when 16-year-old Rida returned to the border town of Fnideq after days in Ceuta without his six-year-old brother, Rayan. He said Rayan, who had swum into Ceuta with friends ahead of him, had died in the forest there on Saturday night.
Rida wore neon-coloured football clothes and did not know where to go. His parents did not know what had happened, or that his brother was gone. He was crying and saying “my brother” when a Moroccan police officer arrived and persuaded him to climb into a police van filled with other returned migrants, whom the officer said were being driven back to their hometowns.
The last thing Ahlam, a 38-year-old housekeeper from Tangier, knows about her teenage daughter Arwa is that she was swimming towards Ceuta on Thursday when a coastguard boat approached.
Arwa’s little brother was swimming with her. She shouted at him to swim back to Morocco, which he did, and he told their mother what had happened.
They have not heard from Arwa in the three days since. Ahlam has been wandering the streets of Fnideq, sunburned, her sandalled feet darkened with dirt.
She kissed a picture on her phone of Arwa smiling in a football jersey with a parakeet on her shoulder.
“I am so afraid she’s dead,” Ahlam said. “I will stay here. I will not go home until I know what happened.”
Additional reporting by Barney Jopson
