At least 23 migrants who died last month in a mass attempt to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco likely "suffocated", Morocco's state-backed CNDH rights group said on Wednesday.
The death toll after around 2,000 people, many from Sudan, stormed the frontier on June 24 was the worst in years of attempted migrant crossings into Spain's Ceuta and Melilla enclaves, which have two of the EU's only land borders with Africa.
Adil El-Sehimi, a doctor who examined the bodies during a CNDH fact-finding mission, said the migrants had most likely died of "mechanical asphyxiation", when a force or object prevents a person from breathing.
CNDH chief Amina Bouayach said 23 migrants had died in the incident, confirming the official toll.
None of the dead have been buried and autopsies were pending, Bouayach told a press conference in Rabat to present the initial findings of the CNDH probe.
The CNDH said large numbers of migrants, "armed with sticks and stones... split into two groups: the first stormed a border post closed since 2018 and the second climbed nearby walls topped with barbed wire".
It said that the dead had been crushed in part of a border post, where manual turnstiles allow the passage of a single person at a time.
"A large number of migrants found themselves crammed into this narrow area, resulting in jostling which led to migrants suffocating," it said.
