Police have revealing evidence in the case of missing 16-year-old Lora, who has been missing since January 8 from Patras where her parents lived. Anxiety peaks for locating Lora Lomtev, whose traces have been unknown for the ninth consecutive day. The minor had left her parents’ house in Rio, Patras for school, however, as it was proven, her plan was to leave the city by taxi and travel to Athens, to Zografou where she was last seen.
The 16-year-old remains missing since then, with police searching for her throughout Athens, while passenger lists from airports, bus stations, and transportation hubs have been requested to see if Lora traveled abroad from January 8 onwards. According to Mega’s Live News show, the 16-year-old allegedly has already attempted or aims to return somehow to Germany, her birthplace. Neighbors, classmates and friends of Lora have reported that the girl had complaints about her father, who according to her was very strict and authoritarian.
Missing 16-year-old Lora: Family problems and the thriller timeline
Authorities are examining the possibility that Lora managed to leave the country with fake documents by the previous weekend at the latest. The most likely scenario given by police is transportation from Greece to Germany via buses departing from Athens and Thessaloniki. Thus, the prevailing scenario is that the 16-year-old chose this relatively easier way to leave.
Authorities took statements from the minor’s parents to find answers to what she had claimed to her circle. Testimonies had reported that her father was pressuring his daughter and spoke to her in an intense and strict manner about what she wore, how she chose to dress up, as well as where she would go out.
The 16-year-old’s father said in his statement that he monitored his daughter, without letting it be understood that he is strict. Moreover, he mentioned that he fears they might take away Lora’s custody in Greece too, which led to further investigation by authorities. From this, it emerged that when the family lived in Germany, a neighbor had filed a complaint for verbal violence by the father against the 16-year-old, resulting in his custody being temporarily removed for several days. This might have been one of the reasons that pushed him to leave Germany.
Meanwhile, according to the mother and other relatives, they testified that the 16-year-old had said that together with her mother, they wanted to leave the house due to the father’s behavior. The mother had even been called to school due to the 16-year-old’s adaptation problems with the Greek language, where the mother herself expressed her concern to an educator, telling him that she too wanted to leave the house.
The incident with the cut hair
A very particular incident had occurred a few years ago, for which there are not only testimonies from Lora’s classmates and friends but also photographs in which the minor posed. The reason for the noticeably short hair of the 16-year-old during a school trip to Barcelona, which as she revealed to her circle, her father was the one who cut it.
In the images from the trip, Lora has very short hair, while her expression is very gloomy and sullen. The 16-year-old, it appears, was trying to hide her cut hair with hats and bandanas.
A classmate who contacted Live News revealed that Lora had then asked her father to let her go to the hairdresser, resulting in him cutting her hair himself.
“Her mother was very neutral, generally they didn’t take care of her much, she wore the same clothes every 2 days and owed money at the school canteen. We had gone on a trip to Nafplio and she didn’t have money to buy food, we shared something together. One day her mother just came to school and gave her 20 euros to pay off half her debt at the canteen,” said a friend and classmate of Lora.
For her part, a family neighbor said: “I had contact with the parents, they laughed, they weren’t ‘difficult’. The father was an open character, the mother closed. In the neighborhood they didn’t come out, they went to the sea and to shops. My relatives saw a car that came yesterday and they left with a small suitcase”.
The father’s past
However, the details that 16-year-old Lora had confided to her classmate about the reasons the family left Germany and moved to Patras are also revealing.
“She knew broken English and Greek. She knew English, it’s just that there were times when she couldn’t explain what she wanted to say correctly. And I remember asking her: ‘Since you don’t know Greek, why did you come to Patras and to a Greek school?’ Because in Patras we don’t have foreign ones. And she told me they didn’t want to go to Athens because it’s too central. She had come to Patras to make it harder for them to find them,” described a friend of the 16-year-old.
However, this wasn’t the first time the 16-year-old’s father decided to live in another country. In fact, this was the third time for the 65-year-old Ukrainian doctor who left Odessa in the late ’80s, went as an immigrant to Germany and lived there for 3 decades.
With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the then 30-year-old father of Lora who worked as a military doctor in Odessa lost his job. He was forced to emigrate to Hamburg and find shelter in an asylum seekers’ house. There, a few months later, Lora’s half-brother was born, who is now 37 years old.
According to Live News information, in 1995, with the help of a colleague doctor, the family moved to Grohansndorf. Vladimir Lomtev finds work again, first as a manual worker, then in the blood donation service of the German Red Cross and later in a private ambulance company in Hamburg.
The first years in Germany were difficult. His wife worked as a domestic helper and he as a manual worker. Until he became naturalized, he couldn’t practice his profession as a doctor.
In 2000, after 11 years, the time came to acquire citizenship, with a German newspaper then having an extensive report on the story of the doctor from Odessa.
“February 24, 2000, waiting for the new passport. Among the first to apply for German passports are Dr. Vladimir Lomtev, his wife and their 11-year-old son. ‘We feel at home here. We want a normal life like other Germans, with all rights and obligations’ said the Ukrainian doctor who came to Germany in the ’80s”.
The move from Germany to Patras
The next decade, as a member of the medical association, he began practicing medicine again. In 2009, with his second wife, they had Lora. However, the half-siblings had no communication with each other, with testimonies reporting that Lora learned she had a big brother many years later.
“She had told me they had quite a few years’ difference but they had no contact, something like that,” said a friend of the 16-year-old. And her brother told Greek authorities that he has no contact with her, a fact that raises questions about the relationship with their father.
He took his wife and their then 13-year-old daughter and moved to Greece, to an isolated neighborhood in Rio.
Regarding the purchase of the house in Rio, a witness reported: “Lora’s father spoke only German, so the entire transaction was done through a broker and lawyer. The man’s contact with the owner was formal due to communication difficulties. The owner was greatly impressed that a person who speaks neither English nor Greek left Germany and went to Rio’s Aktaio area and not, say, to Athens.
Probably the man was interested in going to live in a better climate, because the house is next to the sea with a large garden. It seemed he wanted a house in nature. He found the house himself through Google and went alone, together with a translator and knocked on the owner’s door to express interest”.
