Soldiers, police and firefighters have been searching underground car parks in Valencia for bodies of people who may have ben trapped in their vehicles following flash floods in central eastern Spain.
The catastrophic floods, caused by a destructive weather system, have killed at least 217 people in Spain - primarily in the Valencia region.
In Valencia’s Aldaia municipality, some 50 soldiers, police and firefighters, some wearing wetsuits, have been searching in a huge shopping centre's underground car park for possible victims.
They used a small boat and spotlights to move around in the huge structure with vehicles submerged in at least a metre of murky water.
A police spokesman told reporters that so far some 50 vehicles had been found but no bodies had been discovered there.
The Bonaire shopping mall's 1,800 underground parking spaces quickly filled with water and mud on Tuesday and Wednesday when the southern outskirts of Valencia were hit by a tsunami-like flooding. The team is using four pumps to remove the water.
Elsewhere, photos showed search teams neck-deep in brown floodwater as they checked submerged cars for bodies at another car park in Paiporta, near Valencia.
The search for bodies has also continued inside houses and thousands of wrecked cars strewn in the streets, on highways, and in canals that channelled last week's floods into residential areas.
On Saturday, the bodies of British couple Terry and Don Turner were found in their car in a sparsely-populated were they lived, around 45 minutes outside Valencia.
Spain's Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said authorities can still not give a reliable estimate of the missing.
Spanish national television RTVE has broadcast pleas for help by several desperate people whose loved ones are unaccounted for.
Residents, volunteers and thousands of soldiers and police officers have also pressed on with their gargantuan clean-up effort to clear out mud and debris.
Meanwhile continuing storms in eastern Spain that led to massive flooding last week dumped more rain on Barcelona on Monday, prompting authorities to suspend commuter rail service.
Spanish Transport Minister Oscar Puente said he was suspending all commuter trains in northeast Catalonia, a region with 8 million people, at the request of civil protection officials.
Barcelona residents received a mobile phone alert for "extreme and continued rainfall" on the southern outskirts of the city, urging people to avoid any normally dry gorges or canals.
Mr Puente said the rains had forced air traffic controllers to change the course of 15 flights operating at Barcelona's airport, located on the southern flank of the city.
Several highways were closed due to flooding, and schools were closed in Tarragona, a city in southern Catalonia about halfway between Barcelona and Valencia, after the red alert for rain.
Many people feel abandoned by authorities, their anger erupting on Sunday when a crowd tossed mud at Spain's royal couple, the prime minister and regional leaders as they made their first visit to Paiporta, where over 60 people died and the survivors have lost their homes and still do not have drinking water.
Spain is used to autumn storms that can lead to flooding, but the latest ones have produced the deadliest flooding in living memory for Spaniards.
Climate scientists and meteorologists say the immediate cause of the flooding was a cut-off lower-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. It was likely fueled by a record-hot Mediterranean Sea. That system simply parked itself over the region and unleashed a deluge.
The Spanish navy's Galicia transport vessel arrived in Valencia's port on Monday with marines, helicopters and trucks loaded with food and water to help with the relief effort, which included 7,500 soldiers and thousands of police reinforcements.
