It is now over a month since the oceanographic vessel Ángeles Alvariño left Tenerife having done all it could do to try to locate the remains of one-year-old Anna and her father Tomas Gimeno, who it seems murdered his daughters and ruthlessly dumped their bodies in the sea in sports bags, before killing himself by drowning wearing a divers weight belt so that he would sink to the sea bed.
The disappearance of Anna, and her six-year-old sister Olivia on April 27th, gripped the nation as a search on land and in the sea in the Canary Islands, and as far away as the Caribbean, was led by Spain’s top investigators from a special department of the Guardia Civil in Madrid.
On June 10th, the worst suspicion was confirmed when Olivia's lifeless body was found 1,000 metres deep on the seabed, 3kms off the east coast of Tenerife, inside a sports bag. After finding the whereabouts of the eldest daughter, the ship continued with the search for Tomás and Anna. However, on June 30th, the operations ended, as the mission was considered impossible due to the depth of the sea, the currents, and the terrain of the seabed.
A Georadar expert called Luis Avial, said yesterday that “It is will now be impossible to find the body of Tomás Gimeno, nothing can be done. There is no point in continuing to search. It is a miracle that the Ángeles Alvariño found little Olivia, and it is a crying shame that the bag containing Anna’s body came open and was found empty in the same location.”
Despite not finding the body of Tomás Gimeno, all hypotheses point to the fact that the father committed suicide after killing his daughters. "The ship has more than likely passed over his body 200 times because it scanned the entire area. But if it was gabled it was impossible to detect it. The signal could have mistaken it for anything else," says the marine professional.
On the other hand, he said he doubts that his body reached the bottom of the sea "with so little ballast." But, if that had been the case, with the gases caused by the decomposition of the body, “it would have risen and moved from the original place and would have been gabled, without reaching the surface. If it had reached the top, it would have already appeared”, he commented.
At the beginning of July, the former head of the Maritime Services and the specialists of the Special Groups of Underwater Activities (GEAS), Juan Ortega Machín, said that it is very probable that the body of Tomás Gimeno was already a skeleton: “Like with any dead body, when he died the internal bacteriological action starts to takes place, and it begins to decompose internally. Add to this natural process the action of crustaceans, fireworms, bacteria and fish in the area that would have been able to eat part of the flesh, then the corpse of Tomás Gimeno could quite possibly be clean and just bones for a long time already”.
