The Moroccan army said it intercepted more than 1,100 migrants trying to reach the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the night of 1 January, Euractiv reports.
More than 1,110 people were detained on New Year’s Eve in the towns of Nador, M’dik and Fnidek in multiple operations carried out by the army and security forces, the army’s general staff said.
The army said 175 of the migrants detained in Nador, near the Melilla border, were from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Yemen. The nationalities of the other detained migrants were not reported.
Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish territories on the northern coast of Morocco, are the only land borders of the European Union on the African continent. These localities are often the target of migrants trying to reach continental Europe.
Spain and Morocco signed a co-operation agreement on migration last February, and Morocco has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the EU in recent years to tackle the problem.
Another important migration route runs through Spain’s Canary Islands, with migrants travelling from the coast of Morocco and the disputed territory of Western Sahara. In 2023, the archipelago faced its worst migration crisis since 2006.
Between 1 January and 15 November, 32,436 migrants arrived on the islands, 118% more than in the same period in 2022, the interior ministry said. Last year hundreds of people died trying to make the perilous sea journey from as far away as Senegal.
