Morocco scandal after video shows Spanish police hitting migrant minors
A young African migrant in the Canaries.
(Illustrative image) AFP - SAMUEL ARANDA
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
It's a video that ignites the internet.
Filmed in January 2021, it shows, in a reception center for minors in the region of Tafira, in the Canary Islands, in Spain, police officers literally beating young Moroccan migrants.
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It's a video of just over four minutes, filmed from one floor of the building.
We see teenagers begging the police to stop beating them.
One of the young people is lying on his stomach.
He is motionless and seems to have passed out.
Throughout the scene, the police seem to ignore the cries of these young people curled up on the ground and who are constantly slapped and beaten.
Images that have therefore toured social networks, so much so that Rabat summoned the Spanish ambassador and demanded that disciplinary measures be taken against the police officers involved.
In the Canaries, the press declines its own version of the affair.
She invokes threats made by one of the Moroccan minors against employees of the reception center, hence the police intervention.
And she even goes so far as to claim that the teenager lying on the ground was pretending to be inanimate.
These images take place in an increasingly tense climate in the Canary Islands, between migrants and the Spanish authorities, against the backdrop of a sudden acceleration in immigration.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), last year some 25,000 migrants arrived illegally
by sea in the Canaries
and half of them came from Morocco.
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Morocco
Spain
Immigration
International Migration
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