Controversy Reignites Over Alleged Moroccan Military Flights to Canary Islands

The information collected on the Flightradar24 page, an air information page, is widely relayed on Facebook and Twitter. According to this site, "several flight plans executed by a C-130H-LM Hercules aircraft of the Moroccan Air Force have been recorded on December 23, 2020 and January 20, from Casablanca to Gran Canaria and Laâyoune, under the cover of commercial flights of the airline Royal Air Maroc (RAM)". The site had also indicated that the flights of the alleged Moroccan military aircraft carried in December as in January the "same registration numbers".

In reality, this is not the case. Approached by the El Closure Digital site, the Gran Canaria airport totally denied the presence of Hercules military aircraft in the airspace of the Canary Islands and stated that "this confusion between aircraft is due to a mistake in the registration of aircraft from Morocco, the registration of the military aircraft having been wrongly attributed to the regular aircraft of Royal Air Moroc".

This version was confirmed by the AENA Agency, which only recorded commercial flights of the Moroccan national airline, Royal Air Maroc, on those dates. According to the agency, "no Moroccan military aircraft appears among the flights that landed or took off from Gran Canaria airport". The Flightradar24 officials finally told EFE that it was a technical error in their facilities.

Messages claiming that Moroccan F-16 pilots had been intercepted by Spanish military personnel over Ciudad Real and forced to return to the strait had already circulated on Facebook and Twitter in mid-August. Information that also proved to be false.