Student Missing in Spain Likely Crushed, Incinerated in Garbage

The search for a 24-year-old student in Mallorca, Spain has come to a tragic end after authorities have determined that she most likely passed out in a trash bin, and was then picked up by a garbage truck and taken to a waste treatment plant where her body was incinerated.

Agostina Rubini Medina had been out drinking with friends in the island tourist hotspot's capital city of Palma on the evening of Oct. 2 when she disappeared. Piecing together her final moments, the National Police of Spain believe Medina was waiting for a bus around midnight to get home to the southwest city of Palma Nova, where she lived, and possibly dropped her phone in the trash, then became unconscious while attempting to retrieve it.

According to the Majorca Daily Bulletin, via UK's The Sun, authorities say Medina "voluntarily climbed inside one of the rubbish containers and lost consciousness."

Police were able to rule out that she ever got on her bus, and a shop employee near her bus stop reported that she stopped in to purchase a bag of chips just before midnight while visibly intoxicated. Medina apparently had a low tolerance for alcohol and had also been taking medication that likely exacerbated the effects.

Shortly after midnight at 12:27 a.m. on Oct. 3, the garbage truck came to collect the bin with Medina still inside, as tracking data from her phone showed it moving along the route to the incineration plant before it went dead around 2 a.m. A witness who was at the bus stop just before at 12:12 a.m. did not report hearing any cries for help before the trash was picked up. Medina’s handbag and blouse were likewise spotted "neatly arranged" by the trash bin.

The truck had reportedly been loaded with over seven tons of garbage, and investigators said that it would be "impossible to survive inside a rubbish truck."

After days of searching more than 15,000 tons of waste at the plant, authorities finally located human skeletal remains in the ash, which have been sent to a medical facility in Palma to determine whether they do indeed belong to Medina.

As Ángel Ruiz, head of the National Police homicide division, told reporters, "The main hypothesis is that she went into the container to get something and had the bad luck of feeling unwell inside the container."

from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/8RYk7rS