Hundreds gather near Ceuta border in anxious wait for missing loved ones as 70,000 people from estimated 72,000 had been returned to Morocco

Hundreds of people have gathered in the northern Moroccan town of Fnideq, near the border with Spain’s Ceuta, flashing photos of their missing loved ones to passersby in the hope of tracking them down.

Their perch was the same small tranche of land that made headlines around the world last week as extraordinary scenes emerged of about 72,000 people making their way into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in north Africa.

On Tuesday, as interior ministers from across the EU joined an emergency videoconference to grapple with the lingering tensions, the focus on the Moroccan side of the border with Ceuta was on the harrowing death toll.

At least 88 people have died in Ceuta, according to local officials, and another 11 in Morocco, while dozens of others remain missing.

“I have just one son,” said Hadijja, who had been waiting at the border since Saturday, scanning the steady stream of returnees for any sign of her 23-year-old son. “I haven’t had any news of him; he’s not answering his mobile phone.”

She had travelled to the border from her home in Tangier, surmising that her unemployed son was among those who had made the crossing. “He didn’t tell me he was going to cross,” she said. “This is a tragedy.”

An estimated 70,000 people who arrived late last week in Ceuta had been returned to Morocco in recent days, Spain’s interior minister said Tuesday.

Referencing posts on TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp that had claimed Morocco was letting people cross the border, people arrived at Fnideq by foot or packed into buses and cars as they joined the surge of people crossing into Spain.

Madrid sprang into action, working with Rabat to return the vast majority of those who crossed within 48 hours, even as it fended off a political crisis sparked by calls for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen free-movement zone.