Álvaro Prieto, the 18-year-old Cordovan who disappeared on October 12 at the Santa Justa train station in Seville, and whose body was found four days later between two wagons of a regional train outside on duty, died of electrocution. This was confirmed yesterday by the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia, after the autopsy performed on the corpse at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Seville.

The boy had climbed on the roof of the train on Thursday and would have touched the pantograph, the articulated arm that connects the train to the catenary, and received an electric shock that would have caused his death. His body ended up falling into the coupling of the wagons of a vehicle that was in the workshop area (under the Carmona road bridge) and that had not served passengers for two months due to a breakdown. A camera from a nearby gas station would have recorded his last movements and the moment of the fatal accident, explained the Delegation of the Spanish Government in Andalusia.

The autopsy has confirmed one of the hypotheses that researchers were studying when they rescued Álvaro’s body, since his limbs were burned and he had lost his hair as a result of the shock.

The young man had a clear goal that festive morning: to return to Córdoba. He had enjoyed a night out with his friends in Seville and was supposed to catch the train back to his hometown on Thursday, but he was late and missed it. With no battery on his mobile phone and no cash, he tried to sneak onto an AVE bound for Barcelona that made a stop in Córdoba.

The security guards intercepted him and prevented him from accessing it. The boy tried again at another time, also on the railway tracks, and was warned again. According to the delegate of the Spanish Government in Andalusia, Pedro Fernández, in Santa Justa he was offered the possibility to charge his mobile with another charger, “but he did not want to accept the help”.

At 9:30 a.m., the last images of Alvaro, alive, were recorded leaving the station in the direction of the nearby Kansas City Avenue. A witness, the mother of a friend of the young man, says that she crossed paths with him on this public road at around 10.30 am. Shortly after, the young man would jump onto the tracks again, but this time almost two kilometers from the entrance to the station. He boarded the train where he met death.

For four days, following a complaint from his parents, the National Police, the local police and the UME carried out several trips and search operations in and around Santa Justa. Sewers and hard-to-reach points were inspected, and drones were also used in the area where the body was found to try to find any trace of the missing person, but all attempts were unsuccessful. According to Fernández, only when that train started moving on Monday could the corpse be detected, because it was “absolutely impossible” to see it from the ground or from a drone view.

When the Police announced on Monday that they would launch a new raid, a reporter recorded one of the trains moving towards the station and, unfortunately, between the carriages was the lifeless body of the young man.

The confirmation of the corpse’s identity shocked his hometown. The fans of Córdova CF, the team in which the boy played in the youth category, gathered at night at gate 00 of the Nuevo Arcángel stadium to pay him a heartfelt tribute. Minutes of silence were also held at the gates of the City Hall and at the University of Córdoba, where the young man was studying Mechanical Engineering, on Tuesday.

Yesterday, the family expressed their desire to hold the funeral in memory of Álvaro Prieto in the strictest privacy.