The war to the death between two gangs devastates the outskirts of Ceuta

“The pandemic has affected the structures of all organizations, including the gangs,” says a national police officer experienced in the drift of organized crime in Ceuta. So far this year, Interior adds three homicides or completed murders in the autonomous city and a fortnight in an attempted degree, more than in all of Aragon, Extremadura or Navarra. The last one was, on Monday, that of Dris Amar, a 37-year-old soldier riddled with bullets in the garage of the Poblado Legionario social housing development, in the heart of Príncipe, the outskirts of the outskirts, an intricate beehive of houses of colors that has grown without order or control during the last 40 years.

The murder has shocked the neighborhood, which is stunned by what the Police considers a “spectacular” increase in violence, especially during the last half year, although the activity of the underworld has not ceased or been confined. In 2020 there were two murders in Ceuta and five attempted murders that did not end in death. In 2021, double (5 and 10). The 2022 projection aims to double the figures again.

The spigot jumped from midnight on Friday to last Holy Saturday. Ibrahim Buselham, a teenager, was shot in the head leaving the Prince of ‘Package’ on a ‘Tayena’ motorcycle, designated as the leader of one of the two gangs facing death for control of the territory and illicit activities in a border city conducive to drug trafficking by land, sea and air (hashish leaves from Morocco to the peninsula and benzodiazepines make their way back); people and weapons.

The rider of the motorcycle shot, another beardless boy, and part of his comrades from Los Rosales, a neighborhood located just one kilometer away that was left without a National Police detachment in 2016, came in droves to identify as perpetrators of the shootings the rival leaders, the Prince’s ringleaders, who the State Security Forces abandoned long before. ‘Tweety’, nicknamed that way because of his light bird complexion, and ‘Laika’, like the stray dog ​​that the USSR took to space, have remained in search and capture ever since.

The boy’s death degenerated into several weeks of riots, shots fired at the houses of enemies and their relatives, beatings and humiliations in the middle of the street, kidnappings and street clashes with knives and firearms. The Superior Headquarters of the National Police, now commanded by former GEO chief Javier Nogueroles, who has the city expectant with his determination to root out the mafia, came to receive support from Special Operational Security Groups (GOES) to regain control and douse the flames.

In summer it seemed to achieve it, although the magma has not stopped boiling even faster than the Police update their databases. At the end of August, all those who had formally accused the leaders of the rival gang collected cable and, in court, said no, that in reality ‘Tayena’ had “coerced” them and even “slapped” them before the Hospital where his colleague was dying so that they could accuse his rivals of the Prince. “We are getting older, but they are always 25 years old,” lamented a policeman, the generational change of the gangs, faster than that of the civil service.

Among the faithful was a brother of the man shot on Monday who has fed the local chronicle of events during the summer. In some news he appears pursued with a gun in his hand to the house where he had taken refuge on the other side of the city. In others, he is the one denounced for shooting at other vehicles. During the first hours it was considered that the murder of his relative would have been “a mistake”. Yamal, a former soldier, who knows the whole family, ruled it out from the beginning: “They are like a bottle and a salt shaker, impossible [confundirlos]”. The police investigations point in the same direction and suggest that another qualitative leap has been made: “From shooting your direct enemy in the leg, they have gone on to kill whoever they can.”

The Police caught the three alleged perpetrators of the crime, all already in unconditional prison: ‘Popis’, ‘Castaña’ and ‘Colombo’, all registered, leaving the garage. The officials were in the neighborhood looking for those who, three nights before, had left seven wounded agents in the stoning with which they were received when going to carry out an arrest. At that moment they heard the detonations at close range and when intervening they were also received with bullets, according to the proceedings published by El Faro de Ceuta.

In six months, ‘Operation Plomo’ has led to the arrest of 36 people, all alleged gunmen or collaborators of one of the two factions of organized crime that branches out into more and more neighborhoods on the outskirts. The State also plans to remove the Comandancia de la Benemérita from the outskirts. The local deputy Fatima Hamed (MDyC) rejects the plan for assuming another withdrawal of the administration towards the center, the only place where even the gang members agree to be left outdoors, who not only fight in the alleys and souks of their neighborhoods, but also on social networks.

Instagram is one more public square where accounts can be settled. Each group has created reference profiles where they explicitly point out and threaten, with photographs, names and surnames, police records and license plates, not only alleged members of the other clan, but also members of the Security Forces for being lined up in front of them. In the videos and audios broadcast, not only are exhibitions with similar war weapons and rivals with long weapons in Ceuta and the peninsula, but also capos are heard calling agents “little brother”.

“The dangerous cocktail of corruption, manipulation and discrimination, lack of values, education and unemployment is bleeding our youth and the community: what the neighborhood is experiencing is incomprehensible to most of us, dismayed and powerless”, warns the president of the Association of Neighbors of the Prince, Abdelkamil Mohamed, after the last murder, more than twenty since 2015.

The spiral of violence only spattered the center of Ceuta with blood in the summer of 2013, when close to 40 was executed in the heart of the city ‘Tafa Sodia’, who for more than 15 years was designated by the Police as “ringleader of a local group of drug traffickers and extortionists. The ‘mandates’ were then much longer. Today, warns an agent, they end up behind bars or underground much earlier and every time “they are younger and feel more unpunished.”

“We are going to put all the means to try to end the tyranny of some heartless murderers who only seek to cause terror: let’s isolate them from each other”, the Government Delegation has requested this week in a call for social complicity that from the frightened Prince and “abandoned” is received with suspicion.

“The city condemned that neighborhood four decades ago to be a pariah while the ‘whiteness’, that is, the Christian-Western working class with rights, left the neighborhood and accessed official protection housing in other areas: the division in ‘ dos Ceutas’ became official”, regional deputy Mohamed Mustafa (Ceuta Ya!) analyzes the drift that has led to the current situation, in which the Prince only receives foreigners to accompany the Christ of Medinaceli, “the image most revered by los ceutíes” according to the official chronicler of the city, José Luis Gómez Barceló, on his transfer to the center.

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