Senior authorities in a Spanish enclave stumbled upon a new method for people to have been smuggled across the border. Spanish border guards discovered that there were two migrants comfortably hidden inside mattresses fastened to the roof of a car at a checkpoint on the frontier with Morocco, video footage shows.
The video posted on social media by a senator in the Spanish parliament is reported to have been filmed in Melilla, an enclave of Spain on the north African coast.
Morocco has become a prime gateway into Europe for African migrants. The recent incident, captured on Sunday, apparently documented the first time ever there has been an attempt to smuggle people inside a mattress, according to local media.
Video footage was uploaded on Twitter by Jon Inarritu, who is a senator from the Basque separatist party EH Bildu. He even took to Twitter to tweet that without a lack of safe ways to seek asylum, a series of events like these would continue to occur on Europe’s southern border.
The video, filmed by someone associated with the search operation, depicted two men in Guardia Civil uniform lifting two hollowed-out mattresses off the roof of a car and cutting them open only to expose the two males inside it.
The car driver escaped to Morocco before being detained by authorities. It may be noted that the two migrants were said to be in ‘stable health conditions’ and thankfully they did not require any medical assistance.
It has been learnt that nearly 6,000 migrants have made it to Melilla and Spain’s nearby Ceuta enclave in 2018, as per the UN refugee agency UNHCR. In October month alone, one African migrant passed away while three others were injured when around 300 of them stormed the border fence separating Melilla from Morocco.