A month and a half has passed since the disturbing disappearance of Emile, the two-year-old boy who disappeared one July afternoon while playing at his grandparents’ house in Le Vernet, a small hamlet in the south of France, in the Alps. All efforts to find him since then, the first days of his life, have been useless and the judicial investigation has been expanded for “arbitrary detention, arrest and kidnapping of a person under fifteen years of age.”
Until now, the causes of the inexplicable disappearance of this minor were being investigated, described as “intriguing” by the area’s own prosecutor, already in the first days of Émile’s disappearance. This change in the legal status of the investigation is actually a consequence of the passage of time, but not “an evolution in it”, as the deputy prosecutor, Emmanuel Merlin, has now pointed out in statements collected by the newspaper ‘Le Figaro’. It is already treated as a criminal investigation. This allows, for example, preventive arrests.
On July 8, the two-year-old boy was playing at his maternal grandparents’ house, where he was spending a few days on vacation. He was wearing a yellow shirt and white shorts. The last to see him were two residents of the town, who saw him go down a street. They did not alert the Police because they did not see anything that was suspicious: they all assure that Le Vernet is a small village where children play in the street.
As soon as the grandparents realized that their grandson was not there, the police were notified. A major deployment was made during the first two days, mainly in the hope that the little boy had been lost and could be found alive somewhere in this rugged and mountainous area. Thousands of people participated in the raids, also with trained dogs and drones.
Hopes of finding him alive faded as the days passed. His own family assured that “the last hope of finding him alive is that someone has taken him and is holding him,” they told Le Figaro.
Investigators have never ruled out any leads. In fact, all the residents have been questioned, their houses have been searched and the search has been extended to more than ten hectares, when the village is barely one hectare.
The interrogations have yielded no clues and the telephone lines have been analyzed, also without results. In mid-July, prosecutor Rémy Avon insisted that no hypothesis was ruled out and that the search for Émile is “one of the most ambitious at the judicial level that has ever been carried out.”
Among the hypotheses is that the little boy got lost and suffered an accident, that he was hit by a tractor and the driver himself did not realize it. However, his body or some trace would have been found. The canine teams have not found it. The other alternative is that someone has taken it.
The residents of Le Vernet, a village of about 150 inhabitants, are greatly affected by the event. In 2015, a Germanwings plane with 150 passengers on board, most of them Spanish and German, crashed in the area while covering the Barcelona-Düsserdorf route. The accident was intentionally caused by the co-pilot.