A week without a trace of the teenager missing in the waters of the Mar Menor

Ivaylo Petrov, Ivo, still missing. After seven days of searching in which the 170 square kilometers of the Mar Menor have been combed, there is no trace of the 16-year-old teenager, who disappeared at dawn on January 5 in the waters of the salt lagoon.

The search for Ivo began around 2:30 on Friday night, when the security guard at the Los Alcázares Nautical Club (17,600 inhabitants, Murcia), a police officer and a civil guard threw a club rescue barge into the water after a shipwreck notice received by emergency services. Just a few minutes later, a 16-year-old minor and FJM, 22, were pulled to shore. They were exhausted and showed symptoms of hypothermia. Both rescued people claimed that they had gone into the water at night and in a canoe. But also that when they left the shore there were three of them. Ivo was missing.

That same night, a search operation began that has been active for a week and has searched for the minor by land, sea and air. Hours after the disappearance, a helicopter with a thermal camera swept the sea looking for residual heat, to no avail. In the morning, vessels from the Air Force from the San Javier base, the Civil Guard, Maritime Rescue and Civil Protection of the municipality joined the search. The GEAS divers of the armed institute searched the bottom of the Mar Menor. Other agents of the force toured the two islands of the salt lagoon on foot. The fishermen joined the device on Monday. Since then, fishing nets, reedbeds, all the edges of the lagoon and the surface of the water have been checked. But Ivo still doesn't show up.

According to the version of the minor survivor of the shipwreck, Ivo arrived on Friday night, after 12 in the morning, at Javier's house, saying that he had found a canoe on the beach. “We decided to go for a walk,” the teenager told EL PAÍS on Saturday afternoon, the 6th. The idea was “just to go from pier to pier,” but they changed plans: “Then we felt strong and said, what if?” Are we going to La Perdiguera?”, he says they asked themselves, in reference to an uninhabited rock almost seven kilometers from the coast of Los Alcázares. They didn't arrive.

According to the teenager, they had with them three oars, one of which broke in half during the journey, and a flashlight. While they were paddling, Ivo stood up to light a cigarette, which unbalanced the canoe and ended up capsizing. “We tried to swim by moving our legs, holding on to the canoe, but we saw that we were barely moving and we let go of it to swim towards the coast,” he said. He and FJM, the only adult in the group, swam towards the lights on the shore and left Ivo with the canoe. “At first we heard him scream, but then we stopped hearing him,” said the minor survivor.

Ivo did not know how to swim, only float: this is confirmed by his family and also by María L., owner of a beach bar in Los Alcázares who knew the boy very well, whom she helped with money or food in exchange for small tasks in her establishment. Hours later, it came to light that the version given by the minor about what happened did not agree with the last WhatsApp conversation they had and to which EL PAÍS has had access.

Some screenshots sent by Ivo himself to a friend on the night of his disappearance show that it was the minor who wrote to Ivo to go to Javier's house, a building located on the beachfront. “Come to Javi's house,” he writes to her at 12:12 a.m. on Friday. Petrov answers that he cannot leave. “He old “It's going to catch me,” he writes. Answer: “We have to do things.” Ivo answers: “I already entered[.] If you call me I know what it is for.” And then a last message: “At 1 o'clock come to Javi's house.” Later there were no more messages.

According to investigation sources, the trace of Ivo's cell phone signal places him in the water that night. His last location, not far from the coast, has been traced without the device having appeared. It has also been revealed that she was the wife of one of the three members of the group, FJM, who warned passersby on the boardwalk that her husband was in the water. Those passersby called the emergency service.

Ivo's family distrusts the version of the two rescued men about what happened that night. They claim that they had told Ivo numerous times that they did not want him to go with them because, according to their statements, they considered that the two young people were bad company for the teenager. They also say that Ivo was “rebellious and naughty” and that on many occasions they punished him without going out, but that he ran away from home. This is what they say happened the night Ivo disappeared: he secretly left his home, without his parents even seeing the clothes he was wearing. Then they found a red jacket missing from his closet and recognized a flip-flop that appeared on one of the islands in the Mar Menor on Friday, a few hours after the disappearance. The family of the missing person has hired a law firm in the wake of the disappearance.

The version of those rescued that after capsizing the canoe they swam for an hour and a half does not convince the investigators. “The water was 11 degrees that night. And they weren't good swimmers. The experts have assured us that with that temperature and without barely knowing how to swim, you don't last more than half an hour,” says Sergio Gil, coordinator of the search for Ivo and head of the Municipal Emergency service.

On Saturday, members of the Civil Guard reported that the owner of the canoe, who lives on a street near Javier, had filed a report that same morning for the theft of the boat, which the rescued maintain that he had provided them. the minor is missing and they don't know where he got it from. The boat has been seized by the Judicial Police, who have opened proceedings, as part of the investigation in which they have also questioned the two rescued people and the father of the other minor as witnesses to the disappearance.

The mayor of Los Alcázares, Mario Cervera (PSOE), has been on the front line of searching for the teenager since Friday, January 5. After a week without finding Ivo, he does not lose hope of clarifying the case and finding him. “We are going to have the device active on the days that are necessary, even if we are left alone,” he defends.

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