Missing boy case baffles Spain

By Paul Henley
BBC News, Gran Canaria

The bespectacled face of seven-year-old Yeremi Vargas is familiar to practically everyone who has set foot on the island of Gran Canaria in the last year.

Yeremi's face is well known across Spain

It is on placards alongside the main motorway, in thousands of shop windows, in the back windscreens of cars.

In fact, most of Spain now knows about the little boy who, one Saturday afternoon last February, was playing on waste ground a few metres from his front door in a working-class town near

Las Palmas airport, and then was never seen again.

Across Europe, the case of this missing child has been eclipsed in the headlines by that of Madeleine McCann. But Yeremi's family are the first to say they have learned some lessons from the McCanns and are determined to make their campaign as far-reaching.

They are not naturally at ease with the media, far from it.

In the weeks following Yeremi's disappearance, his mother, Ithaisa Suarez, beside herself with grief and heavily sedated, was hardly in a fit state to give interviews anyway.

'An individual'

She has since forced herself to practise. She is kind and eager to do the right thing, but she obviously does not enjoy the attention.

And there is no trace of performance in the way she talks about the pain of the last 14 months, shows the photographs of Yeremi that are everywhere in the cramped flat she shares with her parents, sister and youngest son or in how she relates, sometimes tearfully, little details about him.

The police tell us there is a 50/50 chance he is still alive. That might sound bad, but it is enough for us, to give us something to cling to Ithaisa Suarez

"He was a cheerful soul", she tells me, "but painfully shy with strangers."

"He was a bit of an individual. He always preferred fresh vegetables to sweets. His favourite was Brussels sprouts."

Ithaisa was only 16 when Yeremi was born.

Her family were vital to her while she was bringing him up as a single mother.

And it is clearly a very close family, with the warmth that characterises a neighbourhood which, within minutes of Yeremi's disappearance, had mustered a small army of people to search the local streets, calling his name.

"Everyone was amazing", Yeremi's grandmother Herminia says.

"The authorities too. They'd closed the ports within a couple of hours, they were searching ferries, checking the airport.

"We always assumed there was no way anyone could have got Yeremi off the island. Now we simply don't know."

Yeremi's grandfather tells me he still gets up in the night sometimes and sits for hours on the balcony, staring down the street in case he comes wandering home.

Changed behaviour

"The lack of information is so hard," Ithaisa says. "But we will carry on searching for him with hope, just because we have to hope.

"The police tell us there is a 50/50 chance he is still alive. That might sound bad, but it is enough for us, to give us something to cling to."

There is still a total lack of clues as to what happened to Yeremi - no witnesses to his disappearance, no traces of him beyond the yellow bucket and spade left in the sand where he was playing.

In recent months, the Spanish police have been working with Portuguese counterparts to investigate whether there could be a link with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

The two children's faces have begun to appear alongside each other on "missing" posters.

But there have been no answers.

The effect of Yeremi's disappearance on the islanders has been marked.

Ella Tennant, a journalist who has lived on Gran Canaria for many years, says parental behaviour has changed, in a place which always prided itself on being profoundly safe.

"Many children are no longer allowed to get to school or Sunday school on their own, or play in the street," she says.

'He was gone'

The government, worried about preserving its reputation as a friendly and secure holiday destination, has played a high-profile role in the campaign to find Yeremi.

"I know the family personally," says Jose Manuel Soria, vice president of the Canary Islands' government and former mayor of Las Palmas.

"And whenever I see them, I try to reassure them that everything possible is being done to try to trace their boy. But it has been a terrible time for them."

As she sees me out of her flat, Yeremi's mother, Ithaisa, stops and stares at the spot where she last saw her son.

"I called him in for lunch and he nodded and said he'd be there in a moment," she says.

"I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember exactly what he was wearing. Five minutes - it couldn't have been more than five minutes, I put my head round the door and he was gone."