Boats, boats and divers will join forces on Sunday in a search for the missing teenager in the Mar Menor, confirms the mayor of Los Alcázares, Mario Cervera.
«We want to find him to close this sad chapter,» said the mayor, while detailing that «the official version is that he is at the bottom» of a Mar Menor that «people see as something small, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. The mayor has been from the first moment giving support to the relatives of the boy, Ivo Petrov, whose family deserves to «rest», emphasised the mayor. That is why he himself took the initiative to call the captaincy and organise the raid this Sunday, «weather permitting».
This Saturday there will be a meeting at the Club Náutico de Los Alcázares to plan how the raid will be organised.
The operation will start next Sunday at nine o’clock in the morning and will be coordinated by the Capitanía Marítima and the City Council.
«A more exhaustive search».
«The raid is not popular, professional people will go out,» Cervera said, who listed that on Sunday «companies, nautical clubs, the Red Cross, the Government Delegation and the Maritime Captaincy, which is leading the operation, will collaborate. Professional divers from Cabo de Palos will be on hand to carry out a «more exhaustive» search.
The anguish began in the early hours of the morning of the 5th. Minutes after half past two in the morning, 112 received a call from a resident of Los Alcázares who was in the area of the pier and said he heard cries for help from the Mar Menor. They were the calls for help from two boys, Francisco Javier and José David, from the water. According to what they would later tell, they had been shipwrecked with the canoe they were in. Three went out and only two came back.
More than ten days have passed and 112 is still receiving calls from people who have seen in the waters of the Mar Menor what they believe could be clues to help in their search, although none of them have been effective so far. On Epiphany, a warning from a neighbour prompted a Civil Protection boat to be mobilised again. Witnesses claimed that, off the beach of La Encarnación in Los Alcázares, they had seen what they believed to be a body floating in the water. But it was not a corpse: it was branches in the water.