Death toll from storm that battered Spain rises to 7

By Alyssa McMurtry

OVIEDO, Spain (AA) - Spanish police on Friday said they found the bodies of two men who went missing after a severe storm caused flooding around Madrid last weekend.

After five days of searching, the police found the two bodies around the town of Aldea del Fresno in the region of Madrid. One was an 83-year-old with Alzheimer's and another was a 50-year-old who was driving with his wife and two children when flash floods broke out.

His wife and daughter were rescued amid the storm on Sunday night. The next day, his 10-year-old son was found clinging to a tree branch and battling hypothermia.

Floods in the nearby province of Toledo also killed three others, including a 20-year-old man who was trapped in an elevator that broke down and filled with water.

A woman suspected of having been caught by the flooding in Toledo remains missing.

As a consequence of the storm, two other young men drowned after getting caught off guard by the storm while canoeing in the Pyrenees mountains.

Police are also still searching for four others who went missing off the coast of Spain on Sunday.

Two Argentine friends disappeared after heading out to paddle surf around sunrise. That was around the same time that Jan Bokemeyer, 53, a former German professional basketball player, set out on a sailboat with his son, 19, from the Balearic Islands to Mallorca; they have not been seen since.

This past Sunday, a potent storm system lashed Spain with heavy rainfall, causing widespread flooding.

The storm system, shaped in a so-called Omega block, is the same one that created Storm Daniel, which left Greece with record-breaking levels of rainfall and killed at least 11 people in Greece, Türkiye, and Bulgaria.