The body of 18-year-old Cordovan Álvaro Prieto, missing since October 12 in Seville, was found yesterday between two carriages of a train that had not served passengers since August. The boy, who had traveled to the Andalusian capital the day before to party with his friends, was found by a television reporter while doing a live broadcast, just a kilometer from the Santa Justa train station .
The discovery was the dramatic outcome of four days of intense research in which officers from the National Police, the local police, the emergency service and colleagues from Córdova C.F., where Álvaro Prieto played, participated.
Last Thursday morning was the last time Álvaro was seen alive in the vicinity of the Seville station. He had planned to take a train home at 7:30, as he had confirmed to his parents a few minutes earlier, but he was late and missed it. He had no cash and his cell phone had run out of battery. He tried to board another train bound for Barcelona that stopped in Córdoba without a ticket by accessing the tracks, but was intercepted by the station’s security staff, who prevented him from entering.
The last images of Álvaro were recorded at 9:30 a.m., when he left Santa Justa station in the direction of Kansas City Avenue in Seville. An hour later, a witness would confirm that he had crossed it on this same road. But there was no sign of him.
The parents reported the young man’s disappearance a little before 10 a.m., at which time the search device, led by the National Police, was launched.
For more than 72 hours, the area of ??Santa Justa was tracked, both the tracks and a point of nearby fields. But the search teams had not yet reached the place where the train was between the wagons where the body was found, under the Carmona road bridge, where it had been parked for months. Once the body was found in the bottom of the car, it was rescued and transferred to the Institute of Legal Medicine, where an autopsy will be performed to clarify the causes of death.
For now, the police confirm that they are keeping all hypotheses open as part of this investigation.
Among the hypotheses is the possibility that the young man died accidentally – either by asphyxiation, crushed or electrocuted) – or that he had a violent death. One of the assumptions is that the boy, in his eagerness to return to Córdoba without a ticket, could have hidden in the narrow space that joins the wagons to try to evade the surveillance of the Adif staff with the intention of sneaking se in another convoy and that at some point he could have suffered an electric shock that proved fatal. Everything is pending the forensic report.
