Hunt for Anna and Olivia Day 30: No definitive clues after a month missing

It is now a month since Tomas Gimeno, a 37-year-old from Tenerife, failed to return his daughters to his ex-wife and called her to say that she would never see him or them ever again. From the first minute, the Guardia Civil have classified this disappearance as high risk and have not stopped searching by land, sea, and air for little Anna and Olivia, who are aged just one and six years old.

During this time, several lines of inquiry have been kept open, including the idea of kidnapping and escape, because of which the court instructing the case issued an international search warrant and has upgraded it to parricide.

The investigation is one of the most complex that the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Guardia Civil has had to face in recent years, not so much because of the time that has elapsed, but because of the complications involved in looking for clues in the vastness of the ocean, which is where Tomas was last seen and disappeared from.

There have been multiple procedures carried out, starting with the tracking of his mobile phone, through a duplicate of his SIM card, to the analysis of different camera footage that recorded his last known movements before disappearing.

His bank movements have also been analyzed, in case he had made a significant transfer or cash withdrawal, and his home in Igueste de Candelaria has been searched five times with the help of two dogs trained to search for biological remains, as has his car and boat.

The investigation continues to focus on two critical hours between 7.30pm and 9.30pm on April 27^th, when Tomas said goodbye to his parents, accompanied by his girls, until the cameras at the Santa Cruz Marina recorded him entering the port without them. A watchman also saw him loading suitcases and bags onto his boat, without the company of the girls.

Tomas left the marina twice in his boat and at one point was sanctioned by the Guardia Civil for being out after the 11pm curfew as he went to a petrol station to buy a phone charger, before leaving the marina at 12.30am on his speedboat and not being seen again. The agents that stopped and fined him have said there was no reason to suspect Tomas of anything suspicious as he was acting in a very normal way.

The question is, what happened in the 17 hours until his boat was found empty and drifting in the sea by Guimar? Where were the girls during this time? Did he hide them on his boat somehow? Were they on another boat with an accomplice?

Hardly any details of the investigations have transpired as the court has issued a secrecy order around the search, but what is known is that no conclusive evidence has been found in the house, in the Igueste de Candelaria farm, nor in Tomás's boat or car.

Over the next few days, a boat from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography incorporate will start searching the seabed off the southeast coast of Tenerife with sonar and an underwater robot, which is a very complex task due to the depth of the sea in that area, the fact that it is volcanic and irregular in shape, and because of the breadth of the area to be analyzed. They will be following the route that Tomás made in his first incursion into the sea on that fateful night a month ago.