Officially, he is still missing – but Tallink ferry company has released a statement alleging that the 21-year-old Portuguese student reported to have fallen from one of its boats into the freezing Baltic Sea in fact jumped.
Tallink’s evidence (from CCTV cameras) has already been passed to police, along with information that the young man “may have been involved in “various incidents” that took place on the ‘Silja Serenade’ beforehand, reports Observador.
Adding to the intrigue, Tallink’s statement refrains from naming the missing student – identified last week as Diogo Penalva, studying finance and accounting at Lisbon’s ISCTE Business School and taking part in the Erasmus programme at Finland’s Tallin University of Technology.
The statement simply says that the young man “climbed over the railing and jumped”.
Before the jump, there were “various incidents” in which friends of Penalva believe he “could have been involved”.
But other than this, there has been little clarification of the events leading to the young man’s disappearance.
Aland island police are investigating, but the possibility of crime is thought to have been discounted.
Searches went ahead on the night Penalva went missing, but since then they have been scaled back.
Observador describes the ‘search area’ as “over 400 kms”.
The Silja Serenade was taking its passengers from Helsinki, in Finland’s south to Stockholm, across the water in Sweden – a distance of 397 kms.
