Spain said today it planned extraordinary measures to deter African migrants from storming the borders of its North African outposts after 500 people tried to burst through.
Spain said it would invoke for the first time a 1992 agreement with Morocco allowing it to send back to Morocco sub-Saharan Africans who had made it over the razor-wire fences into its North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
Under the agreement, Spain can ask Morocco to readmit the migrants even though they are not Moroccan.
"We are working with Morocco and in the coming days, possibly tomorrow -- exceptionally -- there may be a repatriation of illegal immigrants," Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega told reporters before leaving Madrid for a visit to Ceuta and Melilla.
She was speaking after meeting the leaders of Ceuta and Melilla in Madrid to discuss what to do about a series of mass assaults by migrants on the Spanish outposts, which have Europe's only land borders with Africa.
Many of the migrants are from countries with which Spain does not have a repatriation agreement so they cannot be sent home. Instead they are often taken to mainland Spain and issued with an expulsion order that cannot be enforced.
Some 500 African migrants charged the fences around Melilla early today, and many of the 65 who got through were injured, the government said.
Five died last week in a similar attempt at Ceuta. News reports said all were shot but it is still not clear by whom.
"You're not afraid, because in Africa you have nothing ... you just keep thinking that you are entering Spain," Keta, a 24-year-old Malian who arrived on Wednesday, said. His hands were covered in gashes and his jeans ripped and spotted with blood from where he climbed over the border fence.
A police officer was also slightly injured in the assault on a fence that is between three and six metres (10 to 20 ft) high.
Moroccan news agency MAP reported authorities in Nador, close to Melilla, arrested 85 sub-Saharan Africans on Wednesday, in addition to 134 arrested on Tuesday.
The new arrivals, their limbs and clothes shredded by the wire and some without shoes, raced to the police station, hoping to avoid being sent back by registering with police.
They were then transferred to a dusty and overcrowded Red Cross centre where some hugged friends who had reached Spain on previous days.
Lasi, a 26-year-old also from Mali, who has spent seven months travelling, had a large bruise on his torso where he said police fired a riot control rubber projectile at him.
Spanish police shoot billiard ball-sized rubber balls as a riot control measure.
Compatriot Fagella Berte, was also hit by a police baton.
"When you're at the border, you see the guards, the rubber balls, I didn't want to look at the balls, I just looked at the ground, I was scared," he told Reuters at the Red Cross camp, which has space for 500 but is lodging 1,600 people.