The body of 23-year-old, missing soldier, Mario Quirós, was finally located on Saturday in the El Gradode reservoir in Huesca, Aragón.

Sergeant Quirós had been on manoeuvres on the previous Tuesday when he disappeared during the early hours whilst participating in an assault-diving exercise.

Since then the Spanish Army and the Guardia Civil had been combing the waters of the reservoir.

Although on exercise in the North of Spain, he’d been based in Melilla for the last year. He had studied in the Academia de Ingenieros de Hoyo de Manzanares.

The specialised unit within the Guardia Civil, El Grupo Especial de Actividades Subacuáticas (GEAS) helped out expert divers from the Army, in the almost impossible task of locating a submerged body where muddy waters offered zero visibility.

Such was the difficulty that they used remote-controlled, cameras on an unmanned submersible – in places the reservoir was up to 72 metres deep.

It was three in the morning when the GEAS received a call out to the town of El Grado, after which the reservoir is named. The Army told them that they had been carrying out night dives in pairs to train for operating in low-visibility water. During one of the dives his diving partner lost contact with the victim, who failed to return to the surface.

The trouble was that no exact location had been established for the training dives so the search perimetre was very wide. Knowing the size of the task before them, the GEAS brought in enough equipment for an extended search operation. In the end, it lasted five days.

(News: Gradode, Huesca, Aragon)