Ceutan Mohamed AA agreed with his wife to make two calls on the night of March 8, 2020. He had decided to embark again on one of those drug boats that he had left behind after getting married. He only had to stay at sea for one eraser The plane was empty and had technical problems, he told his wife, without going into further details, on the first call. But the second call never came. “I was expecting him to come back the next day, but I received a call from a relative who told me he had passed away. It was very shocking,” recalls Fatima, who asks to remain anonymous. Her husband, 40, and another passenger, Mustafa DM, 49, had died in an accidental collision riddled with apparent irregularities involving a Gibraltar police boat.
Four years and five months after the accident, the legal case has been provisionally closed in Spain, and is still stuck in the forensic investigation phase in the Gibraltar courts. The families of the two deceased have not even received the death certificates, even though they have been buried in the Ceuta cemetery since then. “We are in limbo,” says Rafael Jiménez de Vicuña, one of the lawyers for the accusations: “I don’t know if there is a diplomatically tense situation and they are not interested in stirring things up, but at the judicial level they have us tied hand and foot.” And this reality is strangling the families. “My three children, aged nine, eight and six, have been left orphaned and without documentation. They are being denied rights. They cannot even have a passport or an orphan’s pension,” Fátima despairs.
The incident, now stuck in the courts, occurred in the early hours of March 8, 2020. Along with Mustafa and Mohamed, Nordin DL, the former’s nephew, and Bruno MGS, the two survivors of the tragedy, were traveling on the semi-rigid boat. It was 3:34 when the Royal Gibraltar Police (RGP) patrol boat Sir John Chapple Gibraltar launched a chase after the drug boat, even though the vessel – considered a prohibited vessel on both sides of the border – was in waters that Gibraltar does not claim as its own. After just nine minutes of twisting and turning, the skirmish ended in a violent collision in which the police boat, reinforced with a serrated keel, passed diagonally over, from stern to bow, the semi-rigid boat, which at that time was travelling without a load. The attack injured Nordin and Bruno, killed Mohamed instantly and mortally wounded Mustafa.
Just after the collision, which occurred 6.36 miles (11.78 kilometers) east of Santa Bárbara beach in La Línea de la Concepción, the police boat moored the drug boat and towed it to the port of Gibraltar. All these movements, including the collision, were recorded by the cameras and sensors of the Integrated External Surveillance System (SIVE) and ended up forming part of a report prepared by the Algeciras Command of the Civil Guard. The Spanish agents even took statements from the two survivors. Both stated that the two Gibraltarian police officers who were travelling in the RGP boat did not provide assistance to Mustafa and that they made the return trip with the GPS turned off, until shortly before reaching land.
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The accident, which occurred in the midst of post-Brexit negotiations between the United Kingdom and Spain, soon became a legal tangle. The location of the incident, in Spanish waters, led to the opening of a judicial investigation in the Court of Instruction Number 4 of La Línea de la Concepción, which has barely made progress in recent years. The Court issued a European Investigation Order to try to identify those involved in the accident, which took more than a year to be rejected due to a procedural defect. After repeated unsatisfied requests, the investigation was provisionally dismissed in April last year at the request of the Algeciras Prosecutor’s Office, which opposed the requests made by the prosecution lawyers – with harsh criticism of them – to try to push the case forward. The Spanish Ministry of Justice has avoided clarifying, when asked by EL PAÍS, how many requests it made to the Rock to respond to the investigation order.
On the other hand, Gibraltar opened its own forensic investigation, which is still incomplete. It relies on the Rock of Gibraltar’s Public Prosecutor’s Office to claim that “Gibraltar cannot, at the moment, comply with Spanish judicial requests.” In 2021, a jury of that investigation – the English procedural system is different from the Spanish one – issued a verdict in which it considered that the two suspected officers could have committed an “unlawful homicide.” But the two officers – who have not been part of the force for two years – appealed to an appeal court, which has ordered a new investigation. In turn, the families of the deceased appealed that ruling last June to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, the highest court of appeal in Gibraltar.
The legal tangle also reached the death certificates, which were never issued for the two deceased, despite the fact that their relatives did receive authorization at the time to repatriate the two bodies from Gibraltar and bury them in Ceuta. The complexity of the event – one of the deceased died in Spain, but ended up on the Rock; and the second died there – complicated the process to the point that the three children each left behind, Mohamed and Mustafa – in this case, completely orphaned – have never been able to claim an orphan’s pension. In the case of the younger offspring, such as Mohamed, the grievance is even greater. “I can’t manage anything on a day-to-day basis that needs their father’s signature. We are in limbo. What we are experiencing is like something out of a movie,” complains Fátima.
The widow claims to have taken the paper that was given to her for the transfer of the body at the time “everywhere and it is of no use.” The family’s lawyer, Rafael Jiménez, admits his astonishment at the lack of a certificate that, in the case of Spain, should have been issued by the Civil Registry of La Línea, which, for a time, was run by the same judge who was investigating the Spanish case. “This is a question of will. If you are investigating a crime that has cost people their lives, the request could have been made to register the death,” complains the lawyer. Meanwhile, in Gibraltar they clarify that it is the families who should request the certificate from their Civil Registry for Mustafá, who died in waters that he considers his own, and raise the case with the forensic investigator for Mohamed. Upon learning of the families’ claim, Gibraltar assures that “the investigating magistrate has addressed the relatives in this regard.”
But Fatima still has no record of that communication, she says. Desperate, she Some 60 relatives and friends have already staged two demonstrations outside the Gibraltar police station. They are demanding justice for their relatives, who they believe are being treated degradingly by the authorities on both sides for travelling on a drug boat. “I don’t see the logic in their lives being worth less than others. What are they? Two dogs? They were citizens with rights and responsibilities,” another of the deceased’s relatives, who also asked to remain anonymous, explains indignantly. “I have had a very bad time, but my children give me the strength to carry on. We have been suffering for four and a half years,” admits Fátima, determined to demonstrate as many times as necessary until she gets answers.
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