Little Émile, only two and a half years old, does not appear. Five days of intensive searching around a town in the French Alps yielded no results. The Prosecutor's Office therefore decided to end the search operation in the area, although the inquiries will obviously continue, in other directions, given the near certainty that the child is not in the area, neither alive nor dead.
Hundreds of people, including police, gendarmes, firefighters and volunteers, have tirelessly searched for Émile within a radius of five kilometers from his grandparents' house, in Le Haut-Vernet, in the Alpes department of Haute-Provence. The boy was last seen on Saturday shortly after 5pm. He was walking alone and down a street. There are two witnesses. They did not give it any importance because it is a very placid town, with just 25 residents, where children run around without the need for adult supervision.
During yesterday morning, around fifty gendarmes carried out a final search, to clear up doubts, on a 1.8 kilometer stretch of road, which connects Le Haut-Vernet with the main town, Le Vernet.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, the thorough search has covered 97 hectares. It is the space that they considered most likely to find Émile in the event that the child got lost or had an accident.
From what transpired until yesterday, there is no indication of a possible criminal act, such as a kidnapping. The family and neighbors have reported to the police. All buildings and vehicles have been searched, to the point of causing a certain psychosis of suspicion and a need for a solid alibi. "That day, at that time, he was putting gas in - commented a neighbor to the newspaper Le Parisien -. I keep the ticket!".
Among the hypotheses that have been studied is that the child had been run over unintentionally and that the perpetrator, for fear of the consequences, had hidden the corpse.
That is why there was suspicion, on Tuesday, about a car on the bumper of which the gendarmes found traces of blood. A sample was sent urgently, by helicopter, to a specialized criminological institute. The result came on Wednesday and was negative. It was hemoglobin of animal origin, not human. Track discarded.
The researchers also focused on a teenager from a family of farmers who already had two accidents with farm machinery in the past and who is known in the area for sometimes driving at excessive speed with a tractor that drags a trailer loaded with straw.
The only slightly strange and surprising element is that, until yesterday, it was not known that the child was accompanied to the house not only by the grandparents, but by other relatives - not his parents -, a total of ten people. The family has not come out to the media. He took refuge in privacy and prayer to endure the anguished wait. Those who know them say that they are very correct and very religious people.
