The officer in Spain’s Civil Guard based in Melilla, one of the country’s two north-African enclaves, has written to the Director General of the Civil Guard to ask for a grant to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, just as his colleagues have been funded for Christian holy trips.
The Civil Guard is a military force tasked with police duties in Spain and comes under the remit of the country’s Interior Ministry.

The officer is requesting the police force help him travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia because they also provide grants to his Christian colleagues to go to the Spanish pilgrimage sites of Santiago de Compostela and Zaragoza, as well as the French pilgrimage site of Lourdes.

Owing to the fact that the Spanish state is secular and its institutions have no official religion, the officer believes that “we must create similar agreements with the same criteria for other religions that have a significant percentage of believers”.
“It is all about equality,” he added.

He points out in the letter that the Muslim population among Civil Guard officers in Melilla is “significant”, according to the Spanish Huffington Post.

bbabo.Net