Hunt for Anna and Olivia Day 11: Police inspect suspicious sailboat in Cape Verde

As reported yesterday, the boat (whose name is omitted for legal reasons) arrived in Mindelo, on the island of San Vicente in Cape Verde on Monday night, covering the 1,500 km journey in five days. As two sailors from Tenerife, the world runner-up in jet skis Tony Herrera and the diver specialized in underwater caves David Morales, found out, the same boat set sail early in the morning from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria bound for Cape Verde on the morning of April 27th, the day the girls were last seen.

Instead of heading directly towards its destination, the boat inexplicably sailed towards Tenerife, keeping close to the coast of Tenerife, even being detected near Candelaria in the hours that Tomás supposedly sailed through the area in his speed boat from the Santa Cruz Marina.

Sources in Cape Verde do not yet know the results of the investigations by the Guardia Civil, to whom Herrera and Morales have informed how they tied the two together, but they did confirm the presence of the British-flagged sailboat in the marina at Mindelo.

Since the arrival of this boat on Monday, the international system on maritime traffic only shows the departure of three sailing boats from Cape Verde, but all of them are heading towards the Canary Islands, which investigators say won’t have anything to do with Tomas, as why would he sail there, then back again.

Investigators have confirmed though, that this boat, with a British flag originally came from Albufeira in Portugal, but was in Las Palmas port from April 13^th until leaving at 8.25am on the 27^th, the day Tomas and his daughters went missing.

“DON’T MAKE THEM SUFFER, THEY ARE NOT TO BLAME”

Yesterday the girl’s mother, Beatriz Zimmermann, asked their father, Tomas, to "give up and don’t make them suffer, because they are not to blame for anything”, and that they will be wanting "to see her desperately.”

In a post on social media, she thanked "the whole world" for the "incredible collaboration" in the search for her little ones and points out that there are “no words to explain what a mother feels when her two reasons for being are gone”.

She acknowledges that it is a "long distance race" and that she has to "be strong for them", while pointing out that her "little girls will be deeply grateful” and “it is very nice to feel the warmth from everyone for their return.”

It finishes by saying “Thank you world for helping me wake up each day hopeful that today they will come back. Thank you world for the compassion and love. Thank you world for helping me bring them back to me.”