Spanish child kidnap inquiry takes grim turn as charred bones declared human

One of Spain's most horrific, long-running investigations took a grim new twist on Monday after two scientists separately confirmed that the mass of charred bones found in a homemade oven at a property owned by the grandparents of missing siblings José and Ruth Bretón belonged to a two-year-old and a six-year-old child. Ruth, six, and José, two, are thought to have been killed by their father, José Bretón, who claimed they had been kidnapped at a park in the southern city of Córdoba while he was looking after them last October. He was eventually arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and held in jail, but has continued to proclaim his innocence. Bretón's ex-wife, Ruth Ortiz, has insisted for months that he had either kidnapped or killed the children out of revenge for her leaving him. Spanish newspapers quoted police as describing Bretón's attitude under interrogation as "ice cold" and investigators have indicated they thought he had either killed his children or was paying someone to keep them at a secret address. Months of searching properties, draining local ponds and dragging rivers had failed to produce results. Bretón, a former soldier, had written to newspapers claiming he had been given information that would allow him to find the bodies if released. Police scientists originally said the bones in a furnace on a piece of land outside Córdoba owned by Bretón's parents belonged to animals. But the interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, admitted that fresh reports on the bones now revealed they included human remains. The oven had been made by covering an open fire with a metal bell cover so that temperatures reached as high as 800C (1,472F), baking the mud underneath. "It is as if it was a cremation oven," Fernández Díaz said. José María Bermúdez de Castro, Spain's most celebrated paleoanthropologist and co-director of excavations at the Pliocene and Pleistocene-era Atapuerca cave site in northern Spain, has reportedly produced a report saying that the bones found in the oven include a six-year-old child's teeth. He had been called in to study the bones after the mother's family asked Francisco Etxeberria, a well-known forensic scientist who has dug up many mass graves left over from the Spanish civil war, to analyse them. He surprised police by concluding that the bones included those of both a two-year-child and of a six year old. "It is obvious there were human remains there," he told the newspaper El País. "They met a violent end." Bretón's lawyer said his client stood by the original police report stating that only animal bones were in the oven. Further tests on the remains are being carried out, though Etxeberria warned that the high temperatures in the oven made DNA testing impossible.