Spain, Morocco Thwart Border Run

(AP)  Spanish and Moroccan security forces thwarted another run by hundreds of African immigrants seeking to enter the enclave of Melilla before dawn Thursday, police said.

Officials gave no immediate figures but news reports said nearly 1,000 Africans seeking to escape poverty and gain a foothold in this outpost of Europe tried to cross over into the tiny Spanish enclave, separated from Morocco by two razor wire fences, in the fifth such assault here in just over a week.

"They did not manage to get in," a police official said on condition of anonymity. "There was a very strong police presence" on both sides of the border, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because police rules bar him from giving his name.

Spanish National Television said the Africans tried to rush the border at several points along the fences, even at an area where the innermost of the two barriers has been doubled in height to 20 feet.

The official Moroccan news agency MAP said Moroccan security forces arrested about 200 people after attempted assaults at two spots along the border. It said 300 to 400 people were involved in the rush but no one got across and there was no immediate word on injuries.

It was the sixth such mass attempt in just over a week at the borders of Melilla and Ceuta, another enclave further west on Morocco's coast. Five of the incidents were in Melilla, and about 700 men made it into Spain. Hundreds also tried last week in Ceuta, where five would-be immigrants died of gunshot wounds.

The Spanish government, facing a humanitarian crisis, said it will start expelling illegal immigrants back to Morocco as early as Thursday under a 1992 bilateral accord that Morocco never implemented.

Under current law, those who make it into Spain are allowed to stay if their country of origin has not signed an automatic repatriation agreement that would let Spain send them home.

That is the case of most of the sub-Saharan countries that are home to the hundreds of men that have arrived in Melilla over the past weeks and months. Their governments refuse to take them back. The revived accord would let Spain expel them to Morocco even though they are not Moroccans.

"The citizens of Ceuta and Melilla, and of Spain in general, must be assured that this government guarantees the security of our borders," Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said after arriving in Melilla late Wednesday to tour the border area.