Police in Spain are investigating why bundles of bones wrapped in sheets with other objects were dumped at sea

Cristian López was about to begin a diving lesson off the coast of Alicante when something caught his eye in the clear, calm water below.



“I looked down and saw what looked like a bag of rubbish,” said the 22-year-old diving instructor.

“We always try to pick them up to keep the environment clean, but when I went down, I saw it was a sheet. And then I saw a doll, which seemed weird, so I took it up to the boat.”

When López and his colleagues returned to dry land and opened the knotted sheet, they found it held not rubbish but a bowl, sticks, bird feathers and, most puzzling of all, a large number of bones weathered a deep brown.

“When I saw the first one I knew it was a human femur,” he said. “And then I saw a rib. I wasn’t scared; more intrigued.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Forensic testing suggests the first bundle was thrown into the sea a few days before it was discovered. Photograph: DHR/Guardia Civil

Since the discovery late last month, the intrigue has only deepened, as Spanish police investigate how and why the human remains came to be disinterred and used in what appears to be a religious ritual with an oddly fiscal twist.

A day after López’s discovery, a specialist team of Guardia Civil divers found another bundle 300 metres from the first, which contained a knife, a doll and more bones – some of them possibly human. A third package was recovered from the waters off the town of Calpe in Alicante late on Thursday. It, too, contained bones.

Forensic tests have shown that the almost complete skeleton from the first bundle had been buried in the ground for 30 to 40 years before being thrown into the sea two or three days before it was discovered. The Guardia Civil say it, like the other bones, bore no signs of violence.

On 1 September Juan Carlos Moragues, the Spanish government’s delegate to Valencia, said photographs and documents from Spain’s inland revenue had also been recovered from the bundles. He said the names on the forms and photos matched those of people living elsewhere in Spain.

Everything in the case, Moragues added, “points to the carrying out of some kind of rite – after which things were wrapped in a sheet, tied up and then thrown to the bottom of the sea”.

The human remains – thought to be from three different skeletons – have been sent for more thorough analysis and to see whether any DNA can be extracted to help identify them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The remains are thought to come from three different skeletons. Photograph: DHR/Guardia Civil

Until then, the Guardia Civil are investigating possible links to Santería, the African-Caribbean religion that fuses Yoruba mythology with aspects of Roman Catholicism.

“Although we’re not abandoning the hypothesis that this might be a Santería ritual, we’re proceeding cautiously and investigators are consulting experts in the field to see whether they can provide any new information that could lead to fresh lines of inquiry,” the force said on Thursday.

The theory is not going down well with followers of the religion in Spain.

Paulino Hernández, president of the Spanish Association of Afro-Cuban Santería, sounded weary as he explained that such rituals had nothing to do with his religion.

“We bury people in our religion,” he said. “Our work – and the whole point of our religion – is to avoid problems and to protect people from getting ill in their daily lives. We would never, under any circumstance do anything like that.”

Hernández called for the public – and the media in particular – to be patient and let the police conclude their investigation.

“People are mixing up things that don’t have anything to do with each other. They need to wait and let the forensic team do their job and shed some light on all this.”

López, too, is keen to know how the bones found their way to the seabed.

“I’ve found boots and other stuff thrown overboard by fishermen in the past,” he said. “But I’ve never found anything like this.”

