Nearly 48 hours after the disappearance of a two-year-old boy, investigators and volunteers tried Monday, in vain, to find the one who disappeared after having escaped the vigilance of his grandparents, in a village in the French Alps .
The searches were concentrated around the hamlet of Haut-Vernet and its 25 year-round inhabitants, located more than a kilometer from the village of Vernet: around sixty gendarmes, including reinforcements specializing in high mountain rescue, a helicopter and a Saint-Hubert dog, with a highly developed sense of smell, were mobilized.
Firefighters, including some dog search specialists, and about 200 volunteers crisscrossed the steep mountainous areas, dotted with small streams, to find Émile, who, if he got lost, would have already spent two nights and a day alone, without eating or drinking, in difficult heat conditions, the department having gone into heatwave vigilance.
“Despite all this research, we have not been able at the time when I speak to you to locate the child”, declared to the press Monday evening Marc Chappuis, prefect of the Alpes-Haute-Provence, Monday at the end of the day after -noon.
“The research will continue tomorrow but we are going to adapt the device so that it is more targeted and selective”, he added: “Concretely, we stop the hunts” to deploy “specialized means in search of traces and of clues”, the research having failed to locate the boy within the perimeter of 5 km around the hamlet of Haut-Vernet, explained the prefect.
“After 48 hours, the child should have been found in this perimeter”, insisted the prefect, stressing that the emergency services no longer had “need any further reinforcements” on the spot and that on Tuesday the sector would be closed to the public and volunteers, many of whom came to help with the hunts.
“All the hypotheses remain valid, none is privileged and none is excluded”, for his part recalled the public prosecutor of Dignes-les-Bains, Rémy Avon, according to whom “there is no no new elements likely to explain the disappearance of little Émile”, despite “many witness hearings”.
The little boy, who had just arrived for the holidays with his maternal grandparents, in Haut-Vernet, disappeared around 6:00 p.m. Saturday.
According to initial elements of the investigation, he left “his grandparents’ place of residence” and was seen “in a downhill street by two people. This is where we then lose track of him, ”according to the prosecution.
The village of Vernet, 125 inhabitants, is located at an altitude of 1,200 meters, in the Trois Évêchés massif, where a Germanwings Airbus A320 crashed in 2015.
The accident, deliberately caused by the co-pilot of the aircraft, resulted in the death of five other crew members and 144 passengers from 19 countries, mostly Germans and Spaniards. A stele in homage to the victims has just been erected at Vernet.