Can smell a corpse at more than 100 meters away. With his privileged nose he has solved the most difficult crimes to solve in the last four years. His name is Scottex, he will be six years old on November 1 and he has just been awarded by the National Police, for whom he works.
This Labrador who is known to all as Scott has become one of the most valuable assets of the Canine Guides of the Corps in the specialty of location of human remains. Like his human companions, Scottex will receive the medal for his police career, together with his guide, Manuel Cortésat the event that the Corps celebrates this Wednesday in Seville, on the occasion of Police Day.
Scottex, along with GEO agents, played a key role in finding the body of Pablo Sierra, the 21-year-old who had disappeared in Badajoz on December 2, 2021 after leaving a nightclub and whom the police and his family were searching for, in an agonizing way, for 20 days.
Submerged in the Guadiana
After clues pointed to the fact that the boy had accidentally fallen into the Guadianaafter a few days, Scottex and his guide tracked the river in a boat for days until the dog found and barked to mark the exact spot where Sierra’s body was sunk, which was rescued by the GEO. With his expertise, Scott shed light on an extensive area where the murky water did not allow police divers to work with sufficient visibility. The joint work of all the units involved in the search resulted in the resolution of the case.
Barely a month after solving the case of Pablo Sierra, the work of Scottex, together with that of the Scientific Police, the GOIT and the Violent Crimes Unit, led to the clarification of the disappearance of two minors more than 300 kilometers from Badajoz. They were Fernando and his cousin Ángel Fernándezaged 17 and 11. On January 11, 2023, one month after they were lost at the door of a supermarket in Madridafter the discovery of Angel’s body, Scott and the Canine Guide Unit found Angel’s remains among tons of garbage at the Ecoparque Waste Center in Toledo. All this after workers at the same center found the body of his cousin, Fernando.
The investigation later concluded that the two minors had traveled to Toledo to see a friend of Fernando’s, but when night fell, they decided to take shelter in the inside a containerwhere they would have died suffocated.
There is no space, terrestrial or aquatic, that Scottex can’t find. It is also capable of locating corpses buried at great depthseven in cases where the killer had gone to a lot of trouble to hide the body of his victim. In one of Scott’s last interventions, in June, police were able to track down the whereabouts of Francisco de Pablo at a country house in Aldea del Fresno (Madrid) two years after it disappeared in the district of Hortaleza.
After taking his life, his murderers had buried him in a septic tank, filled with water, more than two meters deep, under the kitchen floor of the house. They had built a partition wall with bricks and cement on top of it, to make it difficult to locate, which led the agents to name the intervention as operation Snail. The intervention of the GOITthe police group specialized in locating and opening inaccessible places, to rescue the body of the missing person.
Since 2020, when he joined the police force, Scott has shown to have “an excellent ability to find dead bodies in any scenario: searches in large areas, inhumed human remains, collapsed structures and in the aquatic environment,” according to his police merits. “He is a confident dogwith an enormous capacity for concentration and endurance. It tolerates long walks in the bush, which makes it a very useful dog in the search for missing persons”.
Scottex is also participating in searches for missing persons Ana Henaothe Miami businesswoman who disappeared last February, when she went missing in the attacked in her apartment in the Salamanca district of Madridin Madrid. The woman had just moved there to put some distance from her husband, from whom she had she wanted to divorce. The main line of investigation of the police points to the fact that the man, who was arrested and is in prison, traveled from Serbia to kidnap her and ended her life. After the crime, he would have fled Spain in a rental car, with Henao’s body. Police and seven FBI agents combed several locations in the provinces of Guadalajara and Soriawith the help of Scottex, without success.
In a car and a hotel
Ana Henao’s body remains unaccounted for, as does that of Antonio David Barroso, the 15-year-old disabled boy from Morón de la Frontera (Seville) whose mother, Macarena Díaz, confessed to having thrown him to a dumpster in Madrid in September 2021. Scottex has searched for the trace of the minor in the car in which his mother traveled with him to Segovia. With the help of the Forensic Police, he also inspected the room of the hotel in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo) where the woman stayed one night.
Scottex lives at the headquarters of the Canine Guides Unit, in Casa de Campo, surrounded by his four-legged companions who, like him, help to locate corpses or work in other specialties, such as search of drugs, money, weapons, detection of fire accelerants or explosives. Although his handler plans to take him home soon to integrate him into his family. “The bond we have with our dogs is very strong, it transcends the professional,” confesses Officer Cortés. Uninterested in decorations and awards, these days Scottex just wants to play with his guide and his favorite toy: a rolling pin with two handles that won’t stop biting. It is his reward for his work.
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