This morning we published that police divers were still recovering bodies at Ceuta, that the figure of 67 dead was the last one authorities had given, and that readers should hold it loosely.
They should have. Al Jazeera now reports that five more bodies were found along the coastline on Sunday, bringing the confirmed toll to 72.
Miguel Angel Perez, the Spanish government's representative in Ceuta, confirmed the figure. EFE, the Spanish news agency, reports the toll is expected to increase again.
Some of those who died drowned. Others were crushed trying to climb the breakwater that carries the border fence.
A correction we owe readers
On July 31 we declined to publish a claim that Italy had suspended Schengen arrangements with Spain, on the grounds that we could verify only that Italy's prime minister had spoken of shared responsibility while France announced it was tightening its border.
This morning the claim reached us again, and we declined it a second time, in print, in a section headed "What we are not printing." We wrote that Al Jazeera's Ceuta reporting did not mention Italy, Finland, Denmark, Schengen or border controls at all, and we told readers to treat the claim with suspicion until someone produced a source.
Al Jazeera's latest report says Italy suspended passport-free Schengen travel with Spain.
So the claim was true, and we told our readers twice that it probably was not. We are correcting that here rather than quietly amending the earlier story.
What we got wrong was not the caution. A reporter handed us that claim citing a publication's homepage rather than any article, and we could not find it in the reporting available to us at the time. Declining to print an unsourced assertion about an EU member state suspending free movement was the right call on the information we had. Saying it was probably false went further than our evidence supported, and that is the part we got wrong. There is a difference between "we cannot confirm this" and "you should doubt this," and we should have stopped at the first.
We have not verified the accompanying claims that Finland and Denmark called for Spain's suspension from the Schengen zone. Those remain unconfirmed, and we are stating that as an absence of evidence rather than as a judgment.
Where the numbers stand
Al Jazeera reports that more than 48,000 of roughly 60,000 people who crossed had returned to Morocco within 48 hours.
A 500-meter floating barrier, described as about 1,600 feet, was installed off Ceuta on Saturday.
Twenty-two EU member states have called for coordinated action on the border, and an emergency EU meeting has been convened.
The number to watch
Seventy-two is a confirmed count of recovered bodies, not an estimate of how many died. EFE reports it is expected to rise, and recoveries were still underway on Sunday.
We led our front page with 67 for three days and it was wrong by five, through no fault of the reporting, because that is how a count of bodies pulled from the water works. Anyone reading a casualty figure from Ceuta this week should read it as a floor.
