Six Spanish MPs who are part of the Congress's committee for the interior ministry have today viewed all the videos of the massacre that took place at the Melilla border fence on June 24th, which ended with 23 people dead, according to the official version. According to several NGOs, the death toll reached seventy. After viewing images of the massacre, the pressure on the Spanish interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, continues to build, with opposition parties from the PP to Cs, and also including Bildu, targeting him. Even government junior partner Unidas Podemos has criticized him, as not even the number of dead in the tragedy is definitively known.
According to the opposition parties, it is confirmed that "tragic events" took place on the Spanish side of the border, and therefore would be the responsibility of the minister of the interior, and for this reason they do not rule out a commission of inquiry. Some also talk about disastrous management of the operation. The People's Party and Ciudadanos have defended the action taken by the Civil Guard, and have referred to the appearance that the interior ministry head will make in Congress next Wednesday. But they insist that the content of the videos does not match the explanation given by Marlaska. "What he explained to us has nothing to do with what we saw today," indicated the Cs spokesperson on the committee, Miguel Gutiérrez. The PP spokesperson, Ana Belén Vázquez, commented in similar terms: "It has been established that he lied."
In addition, these two parties put their focus on the hypothetical violence of migrants - just as Vox did - taking place with a lack of Spanish police personnel at the border of the North African enclave, and in their opinion the absence of sufficient officers is seen in the fact that 55 Spanish officers were injured. This, they say, is another glaring mistake by Marlaska.
Unidas Podemos, coalition partners of the Socialists, have also not refrained from making criticism, even this Friday, just hours ahead of their joint vote to pass the annual budget. "It cannot be denied that the main events took place in Spanish territory," said the spokesperson for EH Bildu, Jon Iñarritu, criticizing the interior minister for being "not at all transparent" so far and "hidding in generalities". Unidas Podemos rejected that the migrants acted with disproportionate force typical of a "military attack", as the official version says, and criticized the fact that there is still no definitive figure on the numbers of deaths and injuries. They also questioned the procedure by which 470 "hot returns" of migrants to Moroccan territory were carried out at the border, with prior entry of Moroccan gendarmes into Spanish territory also having taken place.
The images that were viewed - and which have not been made public - are in the hands of the head of the Civil Guard command in Melilla, who today went to the Spanish Congress to respond to the doubts of the MPs. Among the images, which include 75 video files, images captured from a drone have been a special centre of attention.