POLICE IN SPAIN found an eight-year-old boy dead in the boot of his stepmother’s car, the government said today, in a case that has gripped the nation.

Hundreds of officers had been mobilised in the search for Gabriel Cruz after he went missing in late February in the south-eastern village of Las Hortichuelas.

“This morning, the Civil Guard stopped the companion of Gabriel’s father while she was transporting the little boy’s corpse in the boot of a car,” Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy tweeted his condolence. “I share with all Spaniards the pain of losing Gabriel,” he wrote.

Gabriel Cruz was at his grandmother’s home when he left to go play at a friend’s house nearby on 27 February. This was the last reported sighting of him before his body was found.

His relatives alerted police who published a missing person’s alert with a photo of the smiling boy, which went viral in Spain via mobile messaging services and social media.

Police and volunteers combed the countryside in the area on foot and on horseback, using helicopters and drones to try to locate him.

On Saturday 3 March, around 1,000 people were involved in the search, a Guardia Civil police spokesman told AFP.

We maintain “hope we will get Gabriel back soon and that he will return home with his family, which is where a boy who is only eight should be,” his father Angel Cruz told reporters last week, before breaking down in tears.

With reporting from Sean Murray

© – AFP 2018

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