Seconds after Mohamed stepped on to Spanish soil, he turned around to see how his friends had fared along the metres-high chain link fence that slices off the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco.
“It was horrible,” said the 20-year-old from Sudan. “It was a bloodbath; many of them appeared dead and many were injured.”
Moroccan state TV said 23 were killed as about 2,000 people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, attempted to cross into one of the EU’s two land borders with Africa last Friday.
NGOs on the ground say the number of deaths could be higher. “We’ve confirmed 37 deaths in the Melilla tragedy,” Helena Maleno Garzón of Walking Borders said earlier this week.
