The Ministry of Defense has sent this Thursday to the duty court of Ceuta and to the Prosecutor's Office the information about some audios in which military personnel boast, laughing, about assaulting migrant people. Margarita Robles' department incorporates this publication into the documentation it had already sent on September 30, after Amnesty International denounced beatings, humiliations, and possible torture committed by members of the Armed Forces deployed in the city.
The recordings, published exclusively by 'elDiario.es', capture a conversation between at least three military personnel during a surveillance duty. In it, they describe surprise blows, deceptions to approach victims, and humiliating practices. "Without gloves it's cooler, because it makes a sound. But with gloves it hurts," is heard as the participants laugh.
Defense has communicated that it attaches the news to the information sent to the judicial authorities for containing references to "alleged criminal conduct by military personnel deployed in Ceuta". "The information is sent for the appropriate purposes and to preserve the good name of the Armed Forces," the statement adds. The submission expands the documentation on events for which the ministry had already ordered an internal investigation aimed at clarifying individual responsibilities.
Surprise blows and humiliations
The conversation took place on the night of September 21-22, next to an official vehicle on the road near the Temporary Stay Center for Immigrants (CETI). The soldiers were on duty and speaking in a public access area. People who were in the vicinity recorded fragments of the conversation with several phones after hearing what they were relating.
One of the participants recounts that they took two migrants behind the vehicle asking them about a supposed card. Another completes the story describing a blow that the victim would have received unprepared. "And I gave it to her without her expecting it," he states. In another passage, they comment that a man burst into tears after a slap and they mock his reaction. These are accounts from the interlocutors themselves about aggressions whose authorship and circumstances must be clarified by the investigations.
They also describe an alleged practice in which a migrant would be forced to hit others under threat of being beaten themselves. One of the soldiers attributes this action to members of the Regulares and enthusiastically compares it to the tests in the 'Saw' horror saga. This reference appears in his account; the unit of those involved in the recordings could not be identified by the journalistic investigation.
References to pain are mixed with comments about avoiding listening to those they encounter during their interventions. "The first two days I listened to them, but if you listen to them, you get sick. Because they tell you every story...", one of them says before casting doubt on those testimonies. The suffering and personal stories of migrants thus appear as something they prefer to stop listening to, while the aggressions they recount provoke laughter from their comrades.
Amnesty demands answers from Robles
The director of Amnesty International Spain, Esteban Beltrán, has considered that the recordings reinforce the complaints that the organization had documented on the ground. In his opinion, they describe "punishment operations that seek to humiliate immigrants", unrelated to an act of legitimate self-defense. "And in this case it can clearly be torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," he warned this Thursday.
The organization has sent a letter to Robles to demand information about the investigations and the measures adopted. It wants to know if the investigations are exhaustive and if military personnel involved in the reported abuses have been preventively suspended. Their questions affect both the clarification of what happened and the guarantees for people who remain in a situation of special vulnerability.
The complaints have been accompanied by various pieces of evidence for a month. The first testimonies were published on September 15, with photographs and medical reports; on the 25th, videos arrived showing aggressions by uniformed personnel against migrants. Amnesty's report later documented beatings, harassment, humiliations, and theft of money and phones. Defense transferred it to the Prosecutor's Office and the court on the 30th and asked the Operations Command to investigate possible individual responsibilities.
That procedure was already underway when Robles publicly defended, last Sunday, October 11, the soldiers stationed in Ceuta. "I am deeply proud of the work they do, a silent work that has suffered some unfair criticism due to lack of knowledge," said the minister. The statement released this Thursday does not detail the results of the investigations or possible precautionary suspensions of specific military personnel, two of the questions on which Amnesty demands an answer.
