Aitor Hernandez-Morales
speaker
131 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Aitor Hernandez-Morales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
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So the latest estimates that we're working with is that around 60,000 people crossed over into this autonomous city that is a Spanish possession and has been, as you were mentioning, since 1668, so quite a while.
But basically, these migrants flooded into the city, and this is a city that normally has a population of 80,000, so you can imagine the impact that it had
As you said, it started out with a small trickle and then more and more people kept crossing over.
And what Spanish authorities immediately detected was that the Moroccan border guards that normally work with the Spanish border guards to keep the city defended
they had essentially vanished from their posts.
And so there was no one really monitoring on the other side.
And thousands upon thousands of unauthorized migrants were seemingly drawn to one of the Moroccan beaches and were able to essentially just swim over to the Spanish beaches and come into the city.
The latest fatality count is up to 88.
Now, it's not a huge distance, but it is fairly deep water.
And certainly for people who are not particularly good swimmers, for the elderly, for children, it is a real challenge.
And then we have to keep in mind the number of people that were in the water.
So we really did see very chaotic scenes and a very deadly situation, especially for unexperienced swimmers.
So it's a really interesting situation because, again, we're still trying to get a clear picture as to what happened and what motivated these people to go over.
As you were mentioning, the Moroccan interior minister has basically been the only person to go on the record about this.
And what he alleged in a statement that he gave yesterday was that –
Social media messages had spread claiming that Spain had relaxed the rules for migration.
Now, the situation is a bit odd because a lot of the people who came over were not carrying any bags, were not carrying anything that you would conceivably think of bringing with you if you are going to flee your country and move elsewhere.
It does seem to recall a similar incident in 2021, which was a lot more small scale.
In that case, only about 8,000 people came over.
But in that instance, the circumstances were almost identical.
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