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 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.
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
