Bones found in Marta del Castillo search, but nobody seems to care?

Marta del Castillo was a young pretty teenager from Seville who disappeared 5 years ago, and is presumed to have been killed by her ex-boyfriend and his family.

Miguel Carcaño is currently doing a long stretch inside for her murder, but has always refused to tell police what he did with her body. Instead, he keeps making up stories, then sitting back and giggling to himself as the National Police spend millions searching for her body, including dragging the Guadalquivir river, digging up a local tip (twice), searching local farms, etc etc etc. The incompetence shown has been staggering – if the kid hadn’t basically annoyed the national media and the Judge by showing them up, he’d have got off scot free.

5 years this has been going on, and so the nacionales decided to hook him up to a lie detector (more here on that). That said to go back and look again in the local tip. So they did. This tip, by the way, is unlicensed and illegal, but nobody seems to care too much.

And last night they found some bones.

Human bones. The media descended onto Seville, and camped outside the Supreme Court for a press conference, held today.

Trouble is, they aren’t Marta’s. They’ve been there for too long – possibly 15 or 20 years, according to a rushed analysis overnight.

So the police and the media have rushed back to the tip, and have carried on digging. Marta’s family have been rolled out again to add more pressure. People weep in the streets for the teenager. Another demonstration against the killer, and more demands for life imprisonment. Etc.

I watched the four main midday news broadcasts today on TV, and checked all the main news websites. They all ran extensive analysis on what a shame this was, a disappointment to the family, ho hum and keep digging, there might be something else there.

And not one has asked the main question: to whom did these bones belong? Someone was dumped at the bottom of an illegal tip 15 years ago and left to rot, but not one news reporter has asked what the police will do to identify these bones.

Very strange.

What’s even stranger is why the nacionales assume that Marta, killed five years ago, could be underneath the bones of someone presumably killed 15 years ago. Don’t they have an archaeologist on the team?

There’s also the question of how reliable the nacionales are when it comes to bones. You’ll remember that when they analysed the remains of Ruth & Jose, those two little children killed by their Dad in Córdoba a couple of years ago, the coppers were convinced their bones were that of a dog. (The truth only came out when Mum paid a private pathologist to re-examine the remains months later).

The lesson is: if you do commit murder in Spain, just don’t be cocky and you’ll probably get away with it.