Marruecos llama a consultas a su embajadora en Madrid

The Moroccan government today recalled its ambassador to Madrid, Karima Benyaich, for consultations shortly after she was summoned to the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Spain.

Moroccan diplomatic sources told Efe that they did not know for the moment any more details about this call for consultations, which raises the tension between Rabat and Madrid to levels unknown in the last decade.

This call for consultations comes at a time when the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, is in the city of Ceuta, where he arrived in a helicopter this afternoon.

The last Moroccan ambassador to Rabat was recalled for consultations in 2007, when Morocco summoned the then ambassador Omar Azziman to protest the announcement of the visit of the King and Queen of Spain to Ceuta and Melilla.

Shortly before this call for consultations, the ambassador had been summoned to the Spanish Foreign Ministry headquarters, where Minister Arancha González-Laya expressed her 'rejection' and 'displeasure' at the massive influx of some 6,000 migrants into the city of Ceuta in the last few hours.

The Foreign Minister reminded Benyaich of the "co-responsibility" in border management and also expressed the Government's "desire" to "look to the future" and "prevent acts like these from happening again".

Likewise, he asked him for his government's "commitment that all those citizens who have entered Spain illegally can continue to return", as he explained in statements to journalists.

According to Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain has managed to return 2,700 of the 6,000 who passed through, a figure that could increase because Efe was able to see that the trickle of returns at the border continued in the afternoon.

Laya also expressed Spain's desire to maintain "good neighbourly relations" and "close relations" between the two countries, as he said in an appearance before journalists, in which he did not accept questions and did not refer to the presence in Spain of the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, admitted to a hospital in Logroño for coronavirus.