On 24 June 2022, around 1,700 people, most of them asylum seekers from Sudan and South Sudan, filed down the wooded slopes of Mount Gurugu in north-eastern Morocco. They were headed to the enclave of Melilla, a Spanish city of some 85,000 people, perched on the coast of mainland Africa.

At first, the migrants met no resistance. That was strange. In the months leading up to that day, Moroccan police had repeatedly raided settlements on the mountain, where thousands of people had taken refuge. The authorities had also prevented local shopkeepers from selling food to the migrants and stopped taxi drivers from transporting them to the Spanish consulate in the nearby city of Nador.

By mid-June, the migrants were feeling trapped. They couldn’t stay where they were for fear of arrest and they were being blocked from using official channels to claim asylum. The way they saw it, they had little choice but to try to cross the border illegally.

Video footage filmed by locals, as well as Moroccan and Spanish authorities, shows that the migrants reached the Morocco-Melilla border at around 8am on the morning of 24 June. They headed to an abandoned border crossing called Barrio Chino, which had been closed since the pandemic, and began climbing the wall surrounding it. Hundreds scrambled over the wire fence on top of the wall and piled into a holding yard on the Moroccan side of the checkpoint. On one side of the enclosure loomed a locked gate. Beyond the gate: Spain.

As more and more migrants entered the enclosure, the Moroccan police formed a perimeter around the border post. They lobbed stones and fired rubber bullets at the migrants and according to the investigative organisation Lighthouse Reports, launched at least 20 gas canisters into the courtyard. Using a power saw, a few of the migrants managed to break open the locked gate. Struggling to see and breathe because of the teargas, people rushed the gap to reach the Spanish side of the checkpoint, which triggered a stampede. As some migrants stumbled and toppled, the crowd pressed relentlessly towards the gate through the teargas. Those who had fallen were trampled.

Basir, a 24-year-old Sudanese man, saw it all. He had been camped out on Mount Gurugu for several months. That morning, he was one of a small number who had scaled the Moroccan border wall, squeezed through the gate and made it over the 5.5 metre border fence, crossing into Spanish territory. He’d ended up on a main road surrounded by olive trees, cacti and unkempt grass. He could see the skyline of Melilla: high-rise apartment buildings, church spires, the sprawling port.

He had little time to contemplate the view. Basir had taken just a few steps into Spanish territory before he was caught by a member of the Spanish Guardia Civil police, who forced him back through the checkpoint into Morocco. As he was being manhandled, Basir saw migrants hanging from the Spanish border fence like wet clothes on a washing line. Others were still crammed into the courtyard, their faces pressed up against jutting shoulders, their arms pinned against sides, their chests squeezed of air. Many were groaning – and some had stopped breathing.

After Basir was dragged back across the border, his wrists were bound with plastic handcuffs, and he was forced to lie down on the road beneath the border wall. There, for around eight hours, with temperatures reaching 27C (81F) in the shade, he and hundreds of other migrants were dropped like bin bags. They were guarded by Moroccan police in riot gear. Footage shows the police beating the migrants with batons as they lay on the ground. Basir was desperate for water – his mouth felt sandy and cracked – but he dared not move. People around him lay motionless: he thought they may be pretending to be dead to escape the vicious beatings being handed out by the Moroccan police officers.

Some migrants had concussions and broken bones and many needed hospital treatment, but the few ambulances that turned up at the scene were used to transport dead bodies to the morgue, or attend to injured police. Buses arrived in large numbers. The migrants were loaded on board and driven to far-flung cities throughout Morocco.

Basir – a pseudonym given for his protection – recounted the harrowing events to me nine months later, in a cramped hotel room in Morocco’s capital, Rabat. Despite the chill of the air conditioning, he was sweating. “I suppose we weren’t human any more, we were just like animals,” he mumbled, wiping his brow.

Official figures from that day indicate that of the roughly 1,700 migrants who attempted to cross the border, 133 were able to claim asylum; 470 individuals, like Basir, entered Spanish territory, but were forcibly returned to Morocco. At least 37 people died, and 77 people remain unaccounted for. The event quickly came to be known as “the Melilla massacre”.

Spain was quick to play down news reports that the tragedy had occurred on its territory. Instead, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, congratulated the Spanish and Moroccan forces for their work that day, declaring the 24 June attempted crossing a “violent assault on Spanish soil”. (He later admitted he’d made that statement before he’d seen any of the images from that day.) Morocco prosecuted 65 migrants for their roles in the crossing. Thirty-three of them have already been sentenced to 11 months in prison for damage to property and attacks on Moroccan officers, while the remaining 32 migrants stand charged with human trafficking. Moroccan police were also accused of trying to cover up their use of excessive force. The Moroccan Association of Human Rights reported that two days after the tragedy, Moroccan border officials had been seen nearby in a cemetery, digging about 20 graves.

Read the rest of the story at The Guardian Long Read: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/the-melilla-massacre-spanish-enclave-africa-became-deadly-flashpoint-morocco