POLICE have managed to unblock the mobile phone belonging to missing Madrid sixth-former Diana Quer, which they hope will reveal content key to finding out what happened to her.
Diana, 18, a student and model from Spain's wealthiest town of Pozuelo de Alarcón just outside the capital, was staying in her family's summer holiday home in A Pobra do Caramiñal, A Coruña province, in Galicia when she disappeared.
She was last seen in the early hours of August 22 last year and the last-known message she sent using her iPhone was at around 02.20 as she was walking the two kilometres back from the town fiestas.
By tracking her SIM card, police worked out she had travelled by car to somewhere near the port of Taragoña, about 20 kilometres away, and that the final signal her phone gave out was at around 04.00 level with the river Arousa off the main highway.
Diana had been studying for her driving theory test at the time, so she would not have been driving the car she had travelled in.
Months later, her battered iPhone 5 was found in the Arousa by a fisherman, and police have been trying since to access the details on it.
They have just received it back from a specialist firm in Germany, which unblocked the PIN for €2,000.
Whoever threw the phone into the river had tried to damage it by folding it in two and had tried 'six or seven times' to access it with the PIN, presumably to wipe out compromising messages or other footage.
Police in the province of A Coruña had already managed to access all bar the last 15 minutes' worth of phone use, and believe this may be key to ascertaining Diana's fate.
No hypothesis has been ruled out as yet – whether murder, kidnap, human-trafficking or even Diana having fled voluntarily, given her turbulent family relations.
She and her sister Valeria, now 17, had long been caught in the crossfire of her parents' messy divorce, with Valeria suffering panic attacks and self-harming, and Diana on Valium for depression and being anorexic.
The young woman, who would now be 19, was – according to witnesses – seen getting out of a car at the port of Taragoña and into a van, apparently voluntarily, and several 'untrustworthy-looking men' were present at the time.
Her father Juan said that since her disappearance he had been 'very concerned' to discover 'the type of people she was hanging out with'.
But her mother, Diana López-Pinel, remains firmly convinced her daughter is alive and could be in the USA or even further afield.
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