Families of Moroccan migrants who crossed into the Spanish coastal exclave of Ceuta spent Tuesday searching for missing relatives or waiting anxiously for news, after a mass border crossing last week.
Speaking near the border crossing between the Moroccan town of Fnideq and Ceuta, the mother of 23-year-old Haitham al-Haddad said she had heard nothing from her son since he left home on Thursday morning (30 July). Her only trace of him was a video circulating on Instagram showing him inside Ceuta.
"I'm dying of fear," she said, adding that she had been unable to focus on work or family life and had suffered a breakdown. "He is my only son."
Another father, named only as Mokhtar, said he had searched hospitals and travelled to a morgue in the nearby Moroccan city of Tetouan while trying to trace his son, Mohamed, but had found no answers.
"If he is alive, I want him to answer me. If he died, I need to know," he said, fighting back tears as he appealed directly to his son.
Not every family was left without word. Mohamed Reda said his 14-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter, who also crossed into Ceuta, had been in daily contact since arriving, telling him they had received medical care, food and clothing.
Reda said his children had decided to make the journey after seeing posts on Instagram claiming the coastal exclave was "open" to migrants. Officials say misinformation spread widely on social media in the days before the crossing, fuelling false hopes among migrants about their chances of reaching Europe.
Spain's Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said on Tuesday that around 70,000 of the roughly 72,000 people who entered Ceuta last week had since left the territory.
He also told European Union counterparts during a video conference that the provisional death toll from the crisis had risen to 75.
Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's two exclaves on Morocco's Mediterranean coast, regularly see attempted crossings by migrants seeking to reach European territory.
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