The Spanish public prosecutor's office has closed its investigation into the deaths of at least 23 migrants at the border fence of the Spanish North African exclave of Melilla in June.
The state TV station RTVE and other media reported on Friday that there were no indications of any criminally relevant behaviour by Spanish security forces.
On June 24, several hundred migrants, mainly from Sudan, had tried to cross the border fence between Morocco and Melilla in order to enter the EU.
In the process, the young men died in a mass panic in a narrow forecourt in front of a border gate that was fired at with tear gas, as well as in the brutal intervention of Moroccan police officers that followed. Spain and Morocco have denied any responsibility for the deaths.
The public prosecutor's office stressed that everything had happened very quickly and that the Spanish security forces could not have recognized the danger.
However, Amnesty International had made serious accusations against Spanish police officers as well.
At a press conference in Madrid last week, Amnesty's secretary general, Agnès Callamard, talked of mass killings, enforced disappearances, torture, pushbacks and racism.
The director of the Spanish section of the human rights group, Esteban Beltran, also explicitly blamed Spanish officials for the tragedy.
However, the Spanish government has repeatedly stressed that these were tragic circumstances on the territory of another country, Morocco. Spanish police officers had obeyed the law and there had been no deaths on Spanish soil, Spain's Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska stressed.
