It must have been a very wretched 24 hours indeed for the parents of Álvaro Prieto. First their son goes missing at the start of the long bank holiday weekend, enough to also worry police to begin a major search for his whereabouts. Their four days of anguish included viral racist conspiracy theories, fuelled by right-wing influencers on Twitter and Telegram, that he had been murdered by gypsies over a girl in the nightclub he had been dancing at with his friends until the early hours of the morning, and shortly after he was last seen at Seville station trying to board a train home to Córdoba.
Their angst over his disappearance was resolved yesterday when not the police, or the emergency military unit search squads, or even the train company, Renfe, or the staff at Seville train station, but a TV reporter working for Spain’s equivalent of the BBC found him, and the morning chat programme immediately decided to broadcast raw, uncut images of their son’s dead body squashed between two train carriages live to the nation. A national media and social media meltdown ensued, and the conspiracy theories became very intense on WhatsApp, as millions gossiped urgently about what had really happened: how had the gypsies got the body back in, and that kind of thing.
Most of the relevant information from the initial forensic examination and the autopsy has already, it seems, been leaked to the press, with all the gory details, and police have found supporting evidence in some CCTV footage from a nearby petrol station. For some reason, having not been let on the train because of digital ticket and phone battery issues after his night out, he left Seville station and then ended up on top of a parked train in another area, grabbing the pantograph or the overhead electrical cabling. He just wanted to get home but was electrocuted. As this news leaked last night, his parents had to put up with clickbait articles headlined with things like “How many volts can a human body take?”.
There will doubtless now be some questions about train and track and station security and how he managed to get back into that part of the complex but all of the conspiracy theories have gone to zero. It wasn’t a gypsy revenge plot, and a group of female gypsies associations, Fakali, has announced today that they will make a formal complaint against the right-wing social media influencers to the prosecutor’s office for anti-gypsy racism. Quite right. The TV programme, Mañaneros, rushed to apologise as quickly as they had rushed to broadcast the images of poor Prieto’s dead body, but I think TVE should cancel the programme and sack the editors. They did, I suppose, report the news, but immediately decided to do so in a very sensationalist manner, maximising the gore factor and we can only imagine causing intense pain to his parents.
This is not the first time that one case or another about some missing person, among hundreds each year, catches the imagination of the nation and sends everyone into a frenzy over what really happened. Spanish media at those moments go into overdrive and the lack of reporting standards or ethics or even media law becomes evident because someone goes too far, again. The most famous reference case is always the Alcasser murders in the 1990s, when the parents of the missing girls were marched onto a live TV chat programme in their village the very night it was reported they had been brutally murdered, with the presenter making heartless remarks and neighbours in the audience applauding. 30 years of things like that are what led a judge and jury in a case in nearby Huelva two years ago, for example, to hold a whole murder trial behind closed doors in order to try to protect the victim’s parents from suffering the anguish of having everything leaked to the media and spread across social networks, TV chat shows and WhatsApp.
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Comment: the Álvaro Prieto case and sensationalist media frenzies in Spain