The operation to find missing British boy Oliver Pugh is still ongoing, despite Spain’s Ministry of the Interior deactivating the alert for the tot.
Late last week, the government posted a photo of little Oliver on Spain’s National Missing Persons Centre (CNDES) website and said he had last been spotted in Marbella, Costa del Sol, on July 4.
Authorities later said they believed the boy’s mum, who is Russian, had abducted him and taken him to her homeland in breach of a court order banning him from leaving Spain.
Today, the public appeal was taken off the CNDES website, confusing many.
Users trying to access the alert and photo of Oliver were met with a message in Spanish, which said: ‘This alert has been deactivated or the URL is incorrect.’
A spokesman for Spain’s National Police in Malaga said this morning: ‘The investigation is ongoing.’
Police said on Friday: ‘The youngster and his father are British, and the mother is Russian, based in Marbella. We are treating this as a parental abduction. We believe the mother has left Spain and has taken the boy to her homeland, which is Russia.’
A well-placed source said Oliver’s mum and dad are reportedly separated, and there was a court order preventing the mother from taking this boy out of Spain.
It is not yet clear if a court has issued an international arrest warrant for the unnamed mum.
It’s also unknown if Oliver was born in the UK, Spain or elsewhere. His parents have not been named.
Yesterday, one of Vladimir Putin’s mouthpieces waded into the case, writing on Telegram: ‘It is suspected that she [the mother] took her son to Russia. This, of course, is not yet a fact.
‘‘But if this is indeed the case, it seems to me that we must do everything possible to protect the mother’s right to be with her Russian child.’
The Ministry of Interior appeals via its missing person centre, said while it was still online: ‘Oliver disappeared on July 4, 2025. His date of birth is November 3, 2021.
‘He has grey eyes, blonde hair, stands 85 centimetres tall and weighs 15 kilos.’
Local reports have said the boy’s dad didn’t report him missing until August 7, more than a month after he ‘vanished’.
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