Police launched a crackdown on illegal immigration in the small Murcian town of Torre Pacheco last week. Sixty officers in the police’s immigration unit blocked the town’s main thoroughfare for hours, in search of undocumented foreign nationals. 58 were detained, and served with expulsion orders. The president of the Association of Moroccan Workers in Spain, Kamal Rahmouni, described the operation as an immigrant hunt. [the police] took anybody who looked Moroccan, or was black or Ecuadorian from the bars, the long-distance telephone centers and even from the mosque, he said. The government denied that police entered the mosque.
