The Spanish Government emphasized on Wednesday that it did not receive any report or official alert from the intelligence services about Ceuta, maintaining that no one predicted the magnitude of what occurred in the city in July. Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano, the delegate of the Government of Spain in the autonomous city, stated at a press conference that the only communications were exchanges of information via WhatsApp between a member of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and a member of his office, highlighting that these messages do not constitute an alert or an official report.
The CNI confirmed that it did not anticipate what occurred in Ceuta on July 30, in a phenomenon described as unusual and different from the migratory crises known until then. The Spanish intelligence services did, however, warn about campaigns on social media that urged an assault on Ceuta's fence, having made warnings to the Government of Morocco, to the Spanish Government's Delegation in Ceuta and to an intelligence unit of the Civil Guard on July 29, the eve of the illegal entry.
According to declassified documents published by the Spanish Government, the CNI identified groups on WhatsApp and Facebook with a total of 180,000 followers circulating calls for entries into Ceuta. A message sent at 1:52 PM on July 29 informed about calls for an assault through the fence and by sea the following day at 8:00 PM. Despite these warnings, the executive maintains that the available information did not allow for anticipating the magnitude that the crisis came to achieve.
More than 72,000 people entered Ceuta illegally and voluntarily on July 30, swimming or jumping the border fence, starting at 11:00 AM. Pedro Sánchez had announced the publication of documents related to the incident in a parliamentary debate, denying that there was evidence of Morocco's involvement in the crisis or that the Government had been alerted in advance to a mass entry with the dimension that it ended up having.
