Omar Y. (not his real name) is from Mali. He’s lived in Morocco for the past three years. For the past two years, he’s had a residency permit, which allows him to work legally on construction sites. However, at 5am on August 12, he was sleeping in his apartment in Tangier when the police knocked at his door.

"When they knocked at my door, the auxiliary forces [Editor’s note: military forces that offer support to the Moroccan police] said that it was nothing more than a routine verification of our documents.



Even so, my roommates and I didn’t open the door because we were terrified. However, the security forces kept banging on the door until it gave way.

Convoys belonging to the Moroccan auxiliary forces drive in the region of Nador on August 17, 2018. (Photos from AMDH-Nador association).

Once they were in the apartment, they took everything from us – our residency permits, our money, even our televisions! When we got to the police station, the officers emptied our pockets, took our fingerprints and then took us away in convoys along with other migrants who had been arrested in other neighbourhoods. There were about 20 of us in each bus.”

According to the Moroccan authorities, the aim of these operations is to “fight against human trafficking” and to “send migrants to towns where the [living] conditions are better”. However, according to the witnesses who spoke to FRANCE 24, during these arrests, the police officers didn’t write any reports documenting the objects that were seized (including money, telephones, etc).

As shown by these photos, which were taken by our Observers, the migrants’ belongings were simply thrown into the street, leaving them to be stolen.

People looted apartments where migrants had been living in the Mesnana and Branès neighbourhoods in Tangier. (Photos gathered by the AMDH-Nador association).

"Once we were in the convoy, we were handcuffed two by two. We tried to understand why we had been arrested, seeing as our papers were in order. But they refused to give us any reasons and things became increasingly tense. After a few minutes, I had a panic attack and I tried to get off the bus. The driver hit me in the stomach.

“Fleeing to avoid being trapped”



Inside the bus, I managed to free one of my hands from the handcuffs. The other migrants and I started to discuss what we’d do. We wanted to get the bus to stop so that we could escape.

These migrants were handcuffed two by two and taken by bus to southern Morocco. (Photos by our Observer)

One Malian man and another man from Senegal managed to get out of their handcuffs completely. The windows were covered with wood planks so they kicked them until they gave way. Then, they jumped out of the window and landed on the asphalt. I screamed for the driver to stop because I saw that the two men who jumped from the moving bus had been very seriously hurt. The driver parked, far behind the men’s bodies. Several European tourists who were driving by stopped their car and started filming the scene. The two men ended up dying from their injuries. The police seemed to panic. Two men had just died on the highway, not far from a police convoy. Clearly, they were not Moroccan. I think they were afraid that people would put two and two together. Me and other migrants took the opportunity to flee and to avoid being trapped. We started running through the forest. We kept running for hours and hours.

Screengrabs of the videos filmed by both migrants and tourists who witnessed the deaths of two migrants on August 12, 2018 near Oujda.