“The major player who can allow us to find Tiphaine is not going to do anything, it’s appalling”, laments Damien Véron, Tiphaine’s brother, after the investigating judge notified the parties of the end of the investigations to find the Frenchwoman who disappeared in 2018 in Nikko, Japan, at the age of 36. The magistrate has never been there and will never go, a decision that Damien Véron considers “unfair”. He doesn’t believe in the accidental trail. The young woman, epileptic, had left her hotel to go for a walk, leaving behind her suitcase, her passport and her sightseeing program.
franceinfo: The judge has therefore completed her investigations and will not be going to Japan. Damien Véron, how do you interpret this decision?
Damien Veron: For us, this is unacceptable, unthinkable. We have been fighting for almost four years to find Tiphaine. We carried out our own investigations on the spot, research to show that the accidental track was unlikely. It’s a disaster. It’s unfair compared to the work we’ve done for four years. We financed the research and the field ourselves. What is also unfair is that we had the support of the Elysée, of the French ambassador to Japan, who was precisely waiting for this trip. And the Poitiers prosecutor’s office itself supported this move. It is all the more incomprehensible. We also have the support of the French community in Japan which awaits us. Everyone supports us and finally, the major player who can allow us to find Tiphaine is not going to do anything, it’s terrible.
What does this decision entail?
It involves a lot of things. We discovered that in Japan, there was no criminal investigation because of a different functioning from ours. So, the investigation in France was an opportunity to, precisely, allow the criminal aspect to advance. The Japanese, whether by Interpol or during international letters rogatory, never answered the questions asked, in particular on the suspects around the hotel. There are a lot of murky things, so by going there, in Japan, the sense of protocol and honor means that the police receive you and that at that time, it is possible to ask for things. For example, there was blood on the walls of Tiphaine’s hotel room. It’s something she could have asked for. She could have asked for an expertise, confronted the suspects. There were plenty of things to do.
You definitely don’t believe in the accidental track?
We no longer believe in it at all, quite simply because we have factual elements that have enabled us to demonstrate that it was not possible. The Japanese explained that Tiphaine had fallen into the river and that following a typhoon, the level of the water made it impossible to find her body. But specialists worked on this data, and in fact, there was neither flood nor typhoon. So the trail of the fall in the water is unlikely, as for getting lost around the hotel, you don’t really have a path, you can’t go far, there is no precipice either… So there is no element which allows to retain mainly the accidental track.
What are you going to do now?
We will try to use other investigative levers. We are going to go there, continue, but it is obvious that it is a blow since a judge moving to Japan gives an official notion which means that we could have had things more quickly and more easily. So we are back in a fight that will be very hard. And our master lawyer Antoine Vey will fight against this decision, and try to do everything so that there is at least one judge, even if it is not the investigating judge of Poitiers, can go to Nikkō to question all the witnesses or even the suspects and who have never been interviewed.