September 9, 2023, dinner time. Carmen Fernandez He served the evening menu to the group of crew members of the oceanographic vessel CSIC García del Cid when the ship was barely 30 kilometres from the Valencian coast of Gandía. The next morning he was gone. A crew member was missing and at 8:20 a.m., Maritime Rescue received the first warning. That was when the agonising search for the waitress who disappeared in the middle of the voyage began and who, a year later, has not been able to get rid of two important related precedents: a strange message to her relatives and a complaint to a colleague years before for sexual assault.
Last April, the Provincial Court of Valencia confirmed the order issued by the Court of Instruction number 3 of Gandía which decreed the archiving and provisional classification of the file opened for the disappearance of María del Carmen Fernández, a 43-year-old woman, native of Cangas (Pontevedra), married and father of three children.
A resolution against which there was no appeal but which has provoked criticism from his relatives, sad because the case “was closed without any legal proceedings having been carried out on the sole basis of the report and evidence sent by the Civil Guard, and which consisted of an inspection of the ship and the collection of a statement from the captain of the ship, three work colleagues and the husband of the missing woman.
Her lawyer, Diego Leis, has announced new requests to shed light on the strange circumstances of the disappearance of the waitress, now one year old and whom the program Saved rescues of La Sexta as well as the testimony of other women victims of sexual assault on the high seas. Fernández obtained a place on the García del Cid in 2018, a year later he denounced a crew member for an alleged crime of this nature.
The case was dismissed in 2020 after, according to the order, both parties submitted a joint brief to clarify that it was a misunderstanding. However, she remained on sick leave until July 2022 but continued without working since she did not want to reunite with the crew member until she was finally forced to return to her duties on the CSIC ship in September 2023. Before that, she also had to undergo a course on sexual harassment.
According to his lawyer, when he tried to board the ship, docked in Barcelona, the man who reported has been found for assault, but he did not sail with the rest of the crew. “That’s one of the things the investigation has to clarify, how long they saw each other and what happened between them,” Leis said.
During the first weeks of the search, the family came to criticize the “total lack of communication” on the part of the CSIC. “We do not know if measures or protocols to prevent harassment were applied. “We do not know the means that the CSIC has planned for the searches at sea, while in other cases of disappearances it has mobilized abundant resources, and we do not know whether or not the maritime safety rules were respected during the navigation,” said his relatives. signed.
A newspaper as proof
Before the ship was taken, her relatives reported that Carmen was “optimistic” and “eager to get on board.” “Once at sea, we don’t know what could have led him to that decision. “She was fine,” her lawyer admitted of the more convincing hypothesis that the woman had decided to end her life. In fact, it was thought that he had left some kind of farewell message next to her diary a few hours before she disappeared. However, the family stressed that it was a communication in which she showed that she was discouraged, but not to the point of interpreting that she wanted or intended to commit suicide.
The ship was carrying out an oceanographic campaign as part of a European project coordinated by the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM) of the CSIC in Barcelona. Specifically, a study of the optical properties of the seabed through the use of physical parameters with the oceanographic rosette, a device used to take water samples.
