Salamanca (EFE).- Four of the six cadaveric dogs that the Spanish Civil Guard has are this Friday in the Sierra de Béjar in Salamanca looking for the Barcelona mountaineer who disappeared there four months ago.
They are “super specialized” dogs capable of smelling a corpse at about 100 meters and detecting a human tooth at 25 meters, sources from the Civil Guard have explained to Efe.
These dogs are “the jewel in the crown” of the great operation deployed this Thursday and Friday to try to find the 45-year-old mountaineer José Antonio Martínez, of whom there has been no trace since December 29 in the morning he undertook alone the route to Calvitero peak.
No trace since December 29
The operation, directed by the Civil Guard, is made up of 20 members of the Special Mountain Intervention Rescue Group (GREIM), four cadaveric dog guides and four Pegaso drone teams with a total of 5 operators.
The drones make “lower” flights over the ground in which they collect images that the operator sees in real time and that can later be reviewed as they are recorded.
In addition, there are two helicopters that were able to work on Thursday but this Friday they had to stay on the ground due to the low fog and the very strong wind in the area.
This large deployment, as Efe has been able to verify, is made up of around 100 people, including the 30 civil guards who are the ones who go up to search and the Civil Protection volunteers of Castilla y León, who help with supplies and other tasks, as well as Red Cross and Firefighters.
Last day of big deployment
This extensive operation ends this Friday and from now on it will return to what has been done in recent months: GREIM troops in small teams will go up to look for the mountaineer when conditions allow.
The last major device to search for Martínez ended in mid-January due to heavy snowfall in the Sierra de Béjar, and since then GREIM has continued to search for him on the days when it was possible.
The search for the mountaineer is “sectorized” on a map, where the agents register the sectors that they are sweeping and those that return: because they are also reviewing areas that have already been searched during these months.
There hasn’t been a clue about his whereabouts.
At the entrance to the Calvitero trails there are some laminated signs attached to mountains of stones with information about the search for the mountaineer, but so far no clue has been received to help find him.
His wife, Mercedes, and their daughter Carla have been waiting for news for almost four months. The last message they have from him was the audio that he sent them on Thursday, December 29 at nine in the morning to let them know that the route to Calvitero was beginning.
His car was at the starting point of the road, from where he sent that last message, so the Civil Guard, in charge of investigating the case and the operation, works with the thesis that he never left the mountain.
José Antonio and Mercedes live in Las Franqueses del Vallès (Barcelona) and had traveled to Ceclavín (Cáceres), her town, to spend the Christmas holidays. That Thursday, a day without family meals, the mountaineer took the opportunity to follow a route that had been in his head for two years. EFE