Judge believes father of Tenerife girls killed them at home in premeditated plan

Olivia, the eldest, died of acute pulmonary edema, and search teams continue to work at sea to locate the other child, Anna

Ara
2 min
A file image of the oceanographic boat that found the body of six-year-old Olivia at a depth of 1,000 metres on Thursday

BarcelonaOlivia and Anna, the Tenerife sisters killed by their father, allegedly died in his house in a premeditated plan designed to cause pain to the mother and ex-partner of the aggressor, according to the order of the judge collected by various agencies. The magistrate works with the premise that the aggressor committed the crime - a type of gender-based violence - on his farm and then moved the bodies inside some bags (which have been located at the bottom of the sea, where the body of one of them also appeared) and got rid of them by throwing them into the water and then committed suicide.

The body of the eldest daughter, Olivia, was located on Thursday at great depth by the search teams that have been working for weeks in the search for the children at the bottom of the sea, in the area where they found the boat of the father, Tomás G., floating adrift. The first results of the autopsy suggest that the child died of acute pulmonary edema, according to what Efe publishes, but he results of further analysis will shed further light on the circumstances of the crime. The underwater robot continues the work to find the body of Anna, one year old, and the father and perpetrator of the murder, who is also missing. The magistrate of the court of first instance and instruction number 3 of Güímar has informed the Public Prosecutor's Office that the international arrest warrant for the aggressor for having kidnapped his daughters is without effect and has issued another for two alleged crimes of homicide.

The crime, a case of gender-based violence in which the aggressor uses the children to cause suffering to the partner, has highlighted the still little recognised vicarious violence. The minister for Equality and Feminisms of the Catalan Government, Tània Verge, has called on the Spanish government for a change in the legislative framework to include violence against women in all areas and forms.

The robot that has been searching the area in an oceanographic boat for days detected the body of Olivia on Thursday at great depth. It was inside a bag that was tied to an anchor - which could be from the father's boat located floating adrift a few days after all the alarms about the disappearance of the girls -. Rescuers found a second empty bag and are now working to locate Anna, just one year old.

The search for the girls began 40 days ago, when their mother alerted police that their father had not returned them home and had called to say she would never see them again. Initially the investigators had all the hypotheses on the table, starting with the possibility that the father had kidnapped them and had taken them abroad, but all the evidence that has been collected by the Civil Guard have led investigators to a fatal outcome that the gender-based crime has certified.

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