CEUTA, Spain, Aug 21 (Reuters) – In front of a dozen reporters and a handful of local people, a crew of gravediggers in disposable protective overalls and facemasks on Friday started burying some of the scores of migrants who died in a mass crossing into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa three weeks ago.
A Muslim cleric read a quick prayer as the workers lowered the first four victims wrapped in white body bags into cinderblock-lined graves side-by-side at Ceuta’s Muslim cemetery, while hearses were bringing more bodies.
The cemetery’s acting manager, Said Mohammed, said the plan was to bury around 70 bodies in the coming days, with 10 to 12 burials each day.
About 95% of those being buried have not yet been identified, but each grave was marked with a numbered stone in case the body was claimed and repatriated eventually, he said.
Authorities say between 5,000 and 8,000 people remain in Ceuta after at least 72,000 people crossed from Morocco on July 30 in a rush that left 82 migrants dead on the Spanish side of the border, with 14 more deaths confirmed by Morocco.
The migrants were buried with Muslim rites, which require the body to be placed facing Mecca and covered with soil, Mohammed said.
Authorities have only been able to identify six migrants, all Moroccan adult males, according to the latest data provided by Ceuta’s court. Desperate Moroccan relatives of missing migrants have been pleading for information on social media and pressing officials at the border.
The migrants’ fingerprint data was run through Spanish and Moroccan databases and their DNA samples compared with relatives who came forward, said Guardia Civil Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Atoche, who heads the police’s crime division and led a team of nine officers sent to Ceuta.
He said a major reason for the low number of identifications has been the difficulty for Moroccan relatives to legally cross into Ceuta to leave DNA samples at an office set up by Spanish authorities near the border.
(Reporting by Michael Gore and Joan Faus, editing by Andrei Khalip)
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