Family Seeks Answers in 14-Year-Old Death of Moroccan Teen at Canary Islands Migrant Center

Najat still remembers the day in October 2008 when her brother Youssef, 16, left the family home in Sidi Ifni, Morocco, to reach the Canary Islands by boat, accompanied by a few friends. "We thought he had gone to the field with his grandparents," she tells El Diario. Najat was informed by the Moroccan consulate in the Canary Islands of her brother’s accident and immediately went to his bedside.

The minor had barely spent 20 days at Nivaria, a minor center located in La Esperanza, before his fatal fall. "He was on the second floor. One of his friends told me that he had argued with another minor who wanted to force him to smoke and take drugs. That’s when he fell out the window," Najat says, in tears, adding that her brother spent a year in a coma at the Canary Islands University Hospital (CHU) in Tenerife before passing away on February 14, 2010.

To read: Spanish Court Reopens Case of Moroccan Teen’s Death in Juvenile Center Amid Restraint Controversy

Najat was informed of his death when she had returned to Sidi Ifni to see her parents after a year of separation. "They called me and told me that my brother had died. I didn’t understand. Yet when I left him, he was still breathing," she confides. After Youssef’s burial in Sidi Ifni, Najat returned to Spain to seek justice. For 14 years, she has been trying to "find out what happened to Youssef". Without success.

Human Rights Watch had warned in a 2006 report about "serious cases of abuse and ill-treatment" in this Nivaria minor center. "The minors described this second floor as a punishment cell, where they were beaten and locked up for several days," HRW denounced. In 2010, the provincial prosecutor’s office of Santa Cruz de Tenerife requested 100 years in prison against two directors of this center for torture and ill-treatment.