The fragments were eventually sent to Madrid for testing. The family says police have now told them no DNA was recovered and that the bones were those of an animal.
But Gillam-Kirton says experts, including a forensic anthropologist who worked on the Grenfell Tower fire investigation, believe the fragments were human.
“We still don’t know who or what they are,” she said.
Gillam-Kirton complained to the Guardia Civil. She says the reply told her only that the matter had been passed to the courts, and offered condolences for “the death of your relative”, in the singular, when in fact she had lost both her parents.
“It feels like they’re going to hope that we exhaust ourselves,” she said. “Either the burden of grief is going to be enough for us to give up, or that we’re going to financially exhaust ourselves.”
Gillam-Kirton says there is “a real lack of empathy when you’re dealing with families that have lost so much”.
The one thing she wants above all is for someone to acknowledge what went wrong: “No-one seems to be willing to say ‘do you know what, we made a mistake and for that we are sorry’.”
The death toll in Bédar was the highest from any single fire in Spain during the summer of 2026, and one of the largest in the country’s history.
Many victims were trapped as they tried to escape the village, as survivor Malcolm Timbrell told me outside his devastated home in July.
The cause of the disaster, also known as the Los Gallardos fire after the neighbouring town where it started, is the subject of a criminal investigation.
In July, the Guardia Civil said it was believed to have been started by a fallen power line, but that explanation has been called into question.
The BBC has seen a letter in which the Andalusian government refused a request from Socialist MPs for its official reports on the fire. These included any documents explaining why no alert was sent to mobile phones.
