A British couple has been found dead in their car days after severe flash floods swept through Spain.
Don Turner, 78, and his wife Terry, 74, had not been seen since Tuesday, when torrential rains began to batter Valencia. Ms Turner had told friends that they were “popping out” to shop for supplies.
The couple’s daughter, Ruth O’Loughlin, confirmed the bodies were discovered on Saturday. Ms O’Loughlin told BBC Radio WM she found out her parents had died after receiving a message from their friends asking to call them.
“He said ‘Ruth, get your husband’, I called my husband in and he just said ‘Martin, hold your wife’, and said that they’d been found and they’d been found in their car,” Mrs O’Loughlin said.
“We still don’t know exactly what happened to them. The only thing we’ve got from this is that they were together. It’s not the way you want your parents to go,” she added.
The floods, described as the worst decades, have claimed the lives of more than 200 people, while rescuers race against time to locate survivors. The storm caught many victims in their vehicles on roads and in underground spaces such as car parks, tunnels and garages where rescue operations are particularly difficult.
Spanish rescue teams have not found any casualties so far in Valencia’s Bonaire shopping mall underground car park, the interior ministry said on Monday. The ministry said work was continuing in the car park, which has 5,700 parking spaces, to find out if there may be fatalities.
Thousands of Spaniards have flocked to affected towns to help rescue efforts and clean-up, but anger has been rising over a perceived lack of warning over the risk of flooding, and slow or insufficient support in the aftermath.
On Sunday, a crowd of enraged survivors hurled clots of mud at the Spanish royal couple, during their first visit to the centre of their nation’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory.
Spain’s national broadcaster reported that the barrage included a few rocks and other objects and that two bodyguards were treated for injuries. One could be seen with a bloody wound on his forehead. It was an unprecedented incident for a royal house that carefully crafts an image of monarchs adored by their country of more than 48 million people.
Renee Turner, Ms O’Loughlin’s sister, also expressed her anger with Spanish authorities about the deaths of her parents. She told the BBC that she was “extremely angry”/
“Not just our parents, so many people have died in this tragedy, and it is absolutely tragic,” she said.
Ms O’Loughlin has previously said that her parents had moved to Spain a decade ago as they “always wanted to live in the sunshine”.
“They were together. They had great friends there,” she said. “We got comfort in knowing that they made friends everywhere they went.”
