The Civil and Instruction Section number 3 of the Court of First Instance of Vera (Almería) has received the identifications of six of the people who died in the Los Gallardos (Almería) fire, which has left a total of 13 dead, including five foreign citizens and one Spaniard.
Among those identified are a woman from France, a man and a woman from the United Kingdom, a man from Belgium, and a woman from the United States who was married to a Spanish man, also deceased.
In addition to these three men and three women, the judicial body has also received the data of a seventh deceased whose identification requires new analyses to confirm full identification, which is expected to be carried out during the afternoon of this Monday. Furthermore, it is planned to be able to communicate three other identities in the coming hours.
To date, the fire in Los Gallardos has claimed 13 lives, eight of which have been located in the area known as the ravine of death.
The latest victim is a 93-year-old woman who died during Sunday afternoon at the Torrecárdenas University Hospital. She arrived at this hospital after surviving the fire, with burns on 20% of her body, and was hospitalized in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), but had some pre-existing conditions and her frail body could not recover.
There are about twenty people whom their relatives have not been able to locate, and nine disappearances have been reported in connection with the Los Gallardos fire, including the latest report filed regarding two people whom their families cannot locate.
Given the condition in which the bodies were found, the only possible method of identification at this time is genetic analysis.
The Biology department of the Criminalistics Service of the Civil Guard has already obtained the genetic profile of the deceased, but it has not yet been possible to identify all of them because it is necessary to have DNA from a relative to compare the samples, and some relatives are not yet in Spain.
At this point, the collaboration of the consular authorities of Belgium, the United Kingdom, and France has been very helpful, confirmed sources close to the service responsible for identifying the deceased.
“I was on the phone with my father when it all happened”
Among the deceased is Stanislas Verdonckt, one of the first victims of the fire that devastated part of Sierra Cabrera, in Almería, whose name and surname have been identified. And we have done so through his son, Thomas-Wolf, a 33-year-old Belgian virologist, who explained to the camera that “I was on the phone with my father when it all happened.”
Thomas, who resides in Belgium, has traveled to Almería to file the corresponding missing person report and provide his DNA, an essential step to confirm that his father is among the deceased.
A witness from a distance, the young man has had the opportunity to speak with some witnesses and has insisted that “there was neither warning nor official notice” about the fire, and his version of what happened on the tragic Thursday night flatly contradicts the authorities’ version, who claim that those who died in the ravine of death ignored the recommendation to stay sheltered inside the house.
They themselves realized that the fire was coming, and by then “it was too late,” he told the news agency Reuters in an interview.
“The group tried to escape the flames via the main road, but it was impossible,” so “they turned back and were forced to go by the dirt path because the fire was approaching,” he recounted.
Of Belgian origin, Stanislas Verdonckt, Stan to family and friends, had been living for several years in the municipality of Bédar, a small town of just over 900 inhabitants, located in the central area of the Levante Almeriense region, very close to the tourist towns of Mojácar and Garrucha (Almería).
He was 63 years old and was a businessman. He had bought a property on the outskirts of the town, near the area known as the Paraje del Curato, a place where, like many of his compatriots, he came seeking a quiet life under the Spanish sun and where he ended up finding death in what has become the deadliest fire in the history of Andalusia.
Stan spoke Spanish and knew the area perfectly, his son Thomas explained, whose sad expression and teary eyes, captured in an interview broadcast by the British news agency Reuters, have moved those who have had the chance to see him.
Thomas’s phone conversation with his father took place around 9:00 p.m. on Thursday night, in the minutes before what was possibly the worst moment of their lives. During it, Stan explained to his son that the fire was advancing rapidly and fiercely through the mountain toward his property and that they were preparing to leave the house.
