The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, returns today to the Congress of Deputies to once again give explanations about the management his department carried out during the Melilla fence tragedy in which at least 23 immigrants died. He will do so with the vast majority of the chamber – with the exception of the PSOE – against him: on the one hand, the usual parliamentary partners of the Government will ask him for more explanations in the face of the alleged contradictions of the minister during the five months that have elapsed since the event; on the other hand, the opposition directly calls for his "immediate" resignation.
Ministerial sources assure that Marlaska comes prepared – with the same speech that he has been maintaining – for the stake that awaits him at the end of the control session with the Government. Neither the BBC documentary that brought up the case again, nor the first conclusions of the Ombudsman nor a new journalistic work known yesterday have made the Interior version change one iota. And this is it: the action of the Civil Guard to neutralize the "violent" massive jump was "absolutely proportional, professional and in accordance with the law", the work of the agents "did not have any incidence" in the deaths and "no deaths took place in national territory”.
It has maintained it that way and will continue to do so, according to the same sources consulted yesterday after, first, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe made ugly the lack of safe ways to access asylum in Melilla and, hours later , various media outlets under the Lighthouse Reports consortium cast doubt on the official version of the tragedy. To the first, Interior responded by saying that last year it registered and processed 1,999 asylum applications submitted outside national territory. Regarding the second, the department headed by Marlaska regretted that "hypotheses and conjectures are disseminated that lack any serious probative basis."
The most innovative thing about journalistic work is that it places a deceased migrant on Spanish soil. A statement reached by the consortium after the statements of one of the 35 witnesses interviewed. This person identifies a friend as the deceased seen in the video, which shows the police officers dragging him to Moroccan soil from the area where the avalanche occurred. This area is identified by the documentary as Spanish soil, in line with that of the BBC. Interior calls it the "joint operational zone."
"This article does not distort the reality of the facts at any time," they reported from the Interior, from where they again criticized that "certain political parties try to instrumentalize" the tragedy "resorting to journalistic speculation."
It was from the Popular Party that they were most virulent against the Minister of the Interior, whom they demanded to resign before midnight. And if he did not do so, they urged the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, to dismiss him. The last words that the Executive leader uttered on this matter were to close ranks around his minister who, as he put it, has his "absolute confidence" in him. At a press conference at the national headquarters of the popular, the Institutional Vice-Secretary, Esteban González Pons, insisted that he does not believe that "Spanish democracy is so weak after what is known" -in reference to the publication of the consortium- . From the PP they say that "all avenues" are open if the minister does not finally resign. Among them, a commission of investigation in Congress. Last week, together with the PSOE and Vox, they blocked the one that was registered.
