THE body of a 12-year-old boy who vanished during heavy storms in Catalunya 11 days ago has been found floating in the sea off Sitges after an 11-day search.
A fisherman spotted the remains in the water between the coastal towns of Sitges and Castelldefels, just south-west of Barcelona, on Wednesday afternoon and alerted the 112 emergency line.
The news will come as heartbreak to his family in Granollers, who only this week insisted that he was still alive and being held captive somewhere, waiting to be rescued.
Officers from the maritime unit of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalunya’s regional police force, took a boat out to recover the body and transferred it to the Bellvitge Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Barcelona.
Specialists carried out post-mortem fingerprint tests at the forensic institute to formally establish the youngster’s identity.
Catalunya’s regional president, Salvador Illa, confirmed on Thursday morning that the body belonged to 12-year-old Rami and sent his condolences to the boy’s family.
The grim discovery brings an end to a massive search operation and follows earlier fears reported by the Olive Press on Wednesday that the vulnerable youngster may have been kidnapped.
Rami, who had autism, disappeared in the early hours of October 4 after apparently leaving his home disoriented while torrential rain battered his hometown of Granollers, about 25km north-east of Barcelona.
Emergency crews, firefighters and volunteers searched tirelessly, initially focused their search along the beds of the River Congost in Granollers and the River Besos, which flows down to the sea on the northern edge of Barcelona.
Search teams later widened the operation across several stretches of the Catalan coastline.
Mossos investigators are working on the theory that coastal sea currents carried the boy’s body south from another part of the shoreline to the waters off Sitges and Castelldefels where the fisherman found him.
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