For two months, those who live (legally or not) in the 19 square kilometers on which Ceuta is located have been living a Hobbesian humanitarian drama, a nightmare that is both medieval and postmodern: where there is no law, because the declining State is not much more than a short blanket and therefore insufficient, man is a wolf for man (and for women and children, let alone), and the limits between truth and lies disappear.
The autonomous city has registered, in these more than two months since 90,000 people attacked it from Morocco on July 30, "around 40 sexual assaults," police sources from the Family and Women's Care Unit assure EL MUNDO, "approximately half to adult women, and the other half to minors" — the General Council of the Judiciary offered figures on September 22: 37 cases of sexual assault against 39 victims, of which 14 were minors. All the victims, as far as is known, have for the moment also been immigrants: the people of Ceuta themselves comment, when they complain about how the women and young people of the town can barely walk calmly through their streets, that those who have arrived from the other side of the border are taking good care, for the moment, not to look for problems, avoiding touching the people of Ceuta. Not like chasing them through the streets, as this newspaper has seen.
With such a panorama, in any case, no one was surprised that on Saturday, September 26, a little over a week ago, the media published a striking headline that could only reflect the absolute lack of control in which the autonomous city lives, both for the 83,000 Ceutíes, who are beginning to accuse the situation and the complicated uncertainty of when everything will end, and for the 10,000-12,000 immigrants from Morocco who are still in the city. The headline was: "The Police revive a minor after suffering a rape in the Trampolín settlement."
The information, reported by Cadena Ser, described a brutal scene: the agents had gone to the famous beach, converted into a kind of North African Calcutta (and currently at its demographic peak), to the heartbreaking screams of a 17-year-old minor, who was coming out bleeding from one of the substandard homes that the central government has not managed to evacuate.
THE STORY OF THE ALLEGED RAPE
The girl, the text said, had cuts on her face and limbs, and was also bleeding from her crotch. Apparently drugged, "she seemed not to know where she was," the news continued, and she fainted twice in the arms of the police, who had to revive her as best they could before applying the anti-rape protocol and transferring her to the local general hospital. All the information, explained the teletype that echoed what was said by the radio station, came from the police report compiled by the agents of the Police Intervention Unit, which also provided the age of the two detainees, 47 and 21 years old, who denied the facts.
Furthermore, in the same agency text, published by a string of newspapers (some of them foreign), another case was immediately reported.
"In the last few hours," the news continued, "the Police have also detained two other immigrants, over 18 years of age and who entered Ceuta on July 30 and 31, as alleged perpetrators of an attempted sexual assault against another Moroccan minor in the same Trampolín area, police sources have confirmed. This second victim, who had already experienced a similar altercation on Friday, refuses to stay in shelters and has been summoned to the Prosecutor's Office to ratify or not her complaint.
The news that EL MUNDO has now been able to confirm is that both women, the one drugged, raped and revived, and the one who suffered another attempted sexual assault shortly after in the same place and had already had a previous problem, were actually the same.
And, according to police sources fully aware of the facts, subsequent tests had reduced his alleged injuries to "nothing."
MENSTRUATION BLOOD
Tests at the hospital showed no trace of rape. The woman's groin blood came from, although the officers had not realized at all, that she was actually menstruating.
There was also no evidence in her intimate areas of having been forced. She herself had declared that she had been drugged using a powerful anxiolytic called Rivotril (whose active ingredient is clonazepam), but the blood analysis carried out at the hospital showed no trace. Furthermore, always according to these same sources, the woman's attitude did not at all fit with having suffered any sexual assault: she returned to the Trampoline hours after the alleged events.
Those who were able to explore it that Saturday began to collect data, and what they found was another panorama. The woman had escaped at least three times from the center for minor girls where she was housed, usually maintaining a belligerent attitude towards those who coordinated it.
It soon emerged that the minor had already reported similar situations before, usually without providing evidence and in a suspiciously vague manner. In these situations, and also in the one that took those two men, aged 21 and 47, who had already been released, to prison, the minor had not ratified her initial complaint either in court or before the police authorities. When new agents came to look for her at the resources, to facilitate her ratification, they did not find her. Of the successive violations, in short, no trace.
The question is: for what? "It may be mental instability, or she may have thought that the complaint could bring her closer to asylum," police sources conclude: "They tell it to each other."
