Overview
- A massive, unprecedented migrant entry into Ceuta on July 30 exposed a public split between Defence minister Margarita Robles, who says the CNI warned on July 29 of a call to enter by swimming, and Interior minister Fernando Grande‑Marlaska, who says no report forecast the scale of the influx.
- Internal sources confirm the National Police and the CNI ran a joint open‑source migration intelligence exercise in Ávila in May that built the very analytic channels now under question.
- Local police commanders and unions say they received no prior CNI warnings and are demanding precise records showing who got what information, when, and why operational forces were not scaled up.
- Estimates of the number who crossed vary widely, with officials and union figures citing tens of thousands and specific claims ranging from about 70,000 to 180,000, a gap that frames whether any prior intelligence could have justified a much larger response.
- Coverage differs by outlet: some reports stress the May joint exercise and Robles’s dated warning, others emphasize police outrage and document requests to the Audiencia Nacional, and a PSOE spokesman suggested both accounts could be true if warnings did not foresee the event’s extraordinary size.