El Faro de Ceuta published no such article; the screenshot is a forgery. No credible Spanish or international outlet has reported the murder of a Moroccan woman and her daughter by Ukrainians in Ceuta. Neither Spain’s National Police nor the Guardia Civil has reported the detention of any Ukrainian citizens in Ceuta.
Russian propaganda Telegram channels and media outlets are circulating claims that Ukrainian neo-Nazis murdered a Moroccan woman and her seven-year-old daughter in the Spanish city of Ceuta. In the propagandists’ telling, Ukrainian radicals who had banded together into street gangs broke into an apartment occupied by Moroccans during a so-called “patrol” of the streets and stabbed the woman and the child to death. Police, the story goes, detained one of the suspects, who told interrogators he had come to Ceuta to “restore order.” The claim is sourced to the Spanish outlet El Faro de Ceuta, and the posts include a screenshot of an article headlined “Neonazis asesinan brutalmente a una madre y a su hija de siete años en Ceuta” (“Neo-Nazis brutally murder a mother and her seven-year-old daughter in Ceuta”), bylined to journalist Isabel Jiménez and dated Aug. 7, 2026.
None of it is true. El Faro de Ceuta published no such article; the screenshot is a forgery. No credible Spanish or international outlet has reported the murder of a Moroccan woman and her daughter by Ukrainians in Ceuta.
A keyword search of elfarodeceuta.es turns up nothing matching the screenshot. Isabel Jiménez is indeed a journalist at El Faro de Ceuta, and her author archive on the site is active — but it contains neither the article in the screenshot nor anything resembling it. Jiménez covers local civic life, religious communities, city government decisions and migration. Tellingly, on Aug. 12 she published a piece on a warning from the Government Delegation in Ceuta about fake posts and images spreading on social media.
Searches of the wider internet in Spanish, English and Ukrainian likewise return nothing. A double murder, one victim a child, in a city of roughly 85,000 people would have led local and international coverage — yet not a single independent source mentions it. Neither the National Police nor the Guardia Civil has reported detaining Ukrainian citizens in Ceuta. Nor is there any evidence that Ukrainian “street gangs” or “patrols” exist in the city. Calls to “patrol” Ceuta’s streets, homes and businesses were in fact made — but by far-right accounts, some of which were coordinating with one another, according to the disinformation research group 411.
The wave of neo-Nazi appeals around the Ceuta migration crisis unfolded in close concert with Russia’s propaganda apparatus. Analysts at 411 determined that one source of the information barrage around Ceuta was Rybar, a Telegram channel tied to Russian intelligence, whose posts were then amplified by a network of relay accounts, including accounts belonging to the Pravda network. Examining some 4.5 million social media posts, 411 found that accounts linked to Russian security structures pushing far-right messaging reached more than 500,000 people, and that the narratives themselves were reproduced in seven languages and drew over 720,000 views in a six-hour window on Aug. 1. Saman Nazari, a lead researcher at the Brussels-based Alliance4Europe, says escalations of this kind recur across Europe too regularly to be explained by the organic spread, and that specific mechanisms and organizations lie behind them.
The context: in late July 2026, Ceuta was hit by a full-scale migration crisis. On July 30–31, tens of thousands of people attempted to cross the border from Morocco, spurred by viral social media rumors that the border had been opened and by a misreading of a June 29 Spanish Supreme Court ruling. Spanish authorities estimate that roughly 49,000 people entered Ceuta in a single day, and some 78,000 over the several days of the crisis. The overwhelming majority were returned to Morocco. More than eighty people died, most of them by drowning.
StopFake has previously debunked another fake tied to the Ceuta crisis: Fake: 1,500 Ukrainian Citizens Were Among the Moroccans Who Crossed Illegally Into Ceuta.
