The body of the 18-year-old young man from Córdoba, Álvaro Prieto, missing since October 12 in Seville, was found yesterday between two carriages of a train that had not provided passenger service since August. The boy, who had traveled to the Andalusian capital the day before to go out partying with his friends, was found by a television reporter while he was doing a live broadcast, just a kilometer from the Santa Justa train station.
The discovery was the dramatic outcome of four days of intense search in which agents from the National Police, the local police, the emergency service and colleagues from Córdoba C.F. participated. where Álvaro Prieto played.
Last Thursday morning was the last time that Álvaro was seen alive in the vicinity of the Seville station. He was scheduled to board a train home at 7:30 a.m., as he had confirmed to his parents a few minutes earlier, but he arrived late and missed it. He didn't have cash and his cell phone was out of battery. He tried to board another convoy bound for Barcelona that stopped in Córdoba without a ticket, accessing via the tracks, but he was intercepted by the station's security personnel, who prevented him from accessing it.
The last images of Álvaro were recorded at 9:30 a.m., when he left the Santa Justa station in the direction of Kansas City Avenue in Seville. An hour later, a witness would confirm that she had crossed paths with him on this same road. But there was no longer any trace of him. The parents reported the disappearance of the young man shortly before 10 a.m., at which time the search device, led by the National Police, began.
For more than 72 hours, the Santa Justa area was searched, both the tracks and a nearby open field. But the search teams had not yet reached the place where the train whose body was found was located between the cars, under the Carmona highway bridge, where it had been parked for several months. Once the body was found in the undercarriage of the car, it was rescued and subsequently 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 within the framework of this investigation. These include the possibility that the young man died accidentally – either by asphyxiation, crushing or electrocution – 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 connects the carriages to try to avoid the surveillance of the Adif staff with the intention of sneaking into another convoy and that At some point he could have suffered an electric shock that was fatal. Everything is pending the forensic report.
