The Moroccan-controlled territory’s main city Laayoune is reported to be tense and teeming with police and heavily armed troops following riots there Monday after the raid on a crowded protest camp, and Saharawi activists say security forces have been making many arrests. But Moroccan authorities have all but imposed a news blackout on foreign reporters, denying them access into Laayoune by road or air.

The raid by police using tear gas and high-pressure water hoses to tear down the tent camp — set up a month ago to demand better living conditions for the Saharawi people — triggered unrest that reportedly left at least 19 Saharawis and eight Moroccan police dead, either in the camp or the city.

The Spanish Foreign Ministry said one of the dead Saharawis apparently held Spanish citizenship and that it has asked Morocco about this case.

Three Spanish radio reporters made it into Laayoune Thursday but were eventually detained and served with an expulsion order by Morocco. Their employer Cadena Ser says they are now being held at Laayoune’s airport.

“We are permanently making efforts with Morocco so that the right to information can be exercised in Laayoune and everywhere else,” Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Friday from Seoul, where he attended the G-20 summit. Morocco’s government had no immediate reaction.

Zapatero reiterated comments by other Spanish officials to the effect that Spain is “deeply concerned” by the events in Western Sahara, a mineral-rich former Spanish colony that Morocco occupied when Spain pulled out in 1975.

Asked if the unrest merited a stronger reaction from Spain, Zapatero said only that the government needed a full accounting of what had happened and that much of the information coming out of Western Sahara so far has been contradictory.

“I think it is prudent to have complete information,” he said.

Zapatero said the Spanish government’s position was to support talks between Morocco and the Saharawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. The two waged war with each other from 1976 until a UN-brokered truce in 1991.

A two-day round of informal negotiations that started Monday, just hours after the raid on the protest camp, yielded no significant progress beyond a commitment to meet again in December and some confidence-building measures.