El informe policial que Marlaska desconocía apunta a coordinación marroquí en la entrada de 70.000 personas a Ceuta

A 55-page police report delivered to Spain's National Court on Monday has ignited a political firestorm, suggesting that Moroccan security forces may have coordinated the entry of roughly 70,000 people into Ceuta on July 30. The document has become the centerpiece of a judicial inquiry that Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska claims to have known nothing about—a gap that has created visible tension between the ministry and the National Police.

The investigation began the day after the mass crossing, when Judge María Tardón of the National Court's Central Instruction Court ordered an analysis from the General Commissariat of Immigration and Borders (UCRIF) following a complaint filed by the political party Iustitia Europa. She wanted to know whether the surge was "a coordinated action or directed by some criminal organization or group." The police unit assigned to the task, the National Center for Immigration and Borders (CENIF), is an intelligence-focused body that monitors irregular migration flows and issues alerts based on open-source data and field reports. It is not a criminal investigation unit and has no personnel stationed in Morocco, but it draws on information from immigration agents deployed across the border region.

The police analysis rests on video footage, photographs, social media posts, and interviews with migrants who reached Ceuta. Investigators tracked mobile phone prefixes found in the border area that day and found that 90.8 percent belonged to Moroccan carriers. They documented messages circulating on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in the days before July 30—"Share this: on July 30, 2026, we're launching an attack on Ceuta," "it's going to be the best assault," "guys, we're grouping up to leave... we want to move in groups of 10." On the day itself, communications flooded the platforms simultaneously saying "they've opened the door this morning." The police concluded this was no accident. They noted the absence of roadblocks at access points, the organized use of transport vehicles, and the lack of public disorder incidents. For such coordination to occur without planning, they argued, would be "incompatible" with spontaneous action.

The report identifies two categories of actors on the Moroccan side. First, plainclothes agents described as "mobilizers" who walked against the flow of migrants, stood aside from the crossing routes while observing groups advance toward Spain, and in some cases issued instructions to uniformed personnel. Second, uniformed Moroccan gendarmes who provided "indications" to people crossing to help them overcome obstacles and organized the arrival of large vehicles carrying migrants. The police included photographs to support these observations. Critically, the report does not name a specific intellectual author or government decision-maker. Instead, it emphasizes the "permissiveness" of Moroccan security forces and notes that the crossing occurred on Morocco's Throne Day, when aerial camera footage showed notably reduced border controls.

The police explicitly ruled out criminal trafficking organizations as the driving force. Such groups lack the capacity to mobilize 70,000 people and have economic motives that were absent here. They also dismissed the theory that Spain's migrant regularization program created a "pull effect," and noted that the Supreme Court ruling of June 29 limiting hot returns had been deliberately misrepresented in social media posts to encourage the crossing.

The demographic profile painted by the report divides migrants into two groups: young men aged 15 to 25, many of them minors, equipped with wetsuits and flotation devices and predominantly Moroccan; and men around 40 years old in sportswear and sandals, mostly Moroccan but including some sub-Saharan nationals. Only about 10 percent of those who crossed remained in Spanish territory. The police also documented eight alerts issued by CENIF to border posts in Ceuta, Melilla, Algeciras, the Canary Islands, and Cádiz between July 29 and August 4. One alert went out on July 29, the day before the crossing, though police leadership later characterized it as a "routine risk" alert that quantified nothing.

The report's emergence has created a rift between the Interior Ministry and the police. When El Español published the document's contents on Tuesday afternoon, Marlaska said he learned of it then. He sent a letter to National Police Director Francisco Pardo Piqueras after midnight demanding immediate clarification on whether the force possessed evidence of Moroccan involvement. Pardo Piqueras met Wednesday morning with the two senior officials responsible for the immigration unit—Commissary General Juan Ávila and Commissary Alfredo Miravete—and with Javier Antonio Susín, the commissary general of intelligence. Both senior commissaries then submitted reports to their superior stating that the police findings "do not permit establishing the involvement of any government, service, agency, or person," and that the intellectual authorship of the mass entry remains unknown.

A complication has emerged regarding judicial procedure. The immigration commissary asserts in a document submitted to his superiors that Judge Tardón requested by telephone that he maintain "maximum confidentiality" about the report's contents, instructing him that the police were acting as judicial police and could not share information with their Interior Ministry superiors. She also urged them to move quickly on the analysis. Now that Tardón has the police report, she awaits a separate analysis from the Civil Guard on rescue operations, migrant deaths, and whether prior information might have provided warning. Before deciding whether to open a formal investigation, she must first determine whether the National Court has jurisdiction—a question that hinges on whether the events affect national security. The Public Prosecutor's Office has been asked to submit its opinion. That recommendation will likely shape what comes next.