The scope of the search was extended on Monday, July 10, to find Emile, a 2.5-year-old child, who disappeared after escaping the vigilance of his grandparents on Saturday in Le Vernet, a village in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. . “The search has resumed, it has been intensified and the perimeter has been extended,” explained François Balique, the mayor of Vernet.
The search resumed at 6 a.m. on Monday, said the gendarmerie, which mobilized around sixty soldiers, a helicopter and a Saint-Hubert dog, with a very developed sense of smell. Firefighters, including some dog research specialists, and about 200 volunteers criss-cross the steep mountainous areas, dotted with small streams, to find the child, who, if 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.
“We participated for two hours in a search of a hundred people over a radius of one kilometer. I hope that we can finally tell the family where the child is, preferably alive, “said Jean-Paul, 50, a volunteer firefighter and technical officer in the village of Saint-Martin-de. -Brome. “It was not possible to stay quiet without doing anything, we drove 1h30,” said Pauline, 35, her 18-month-old daughter on her back.
The little boy was playing in the garden of his grandparents’ house, in this village of 125 inhabitants, when he disappeared on Saturday around 6 p.m., in a steep area. The grandparents live precisely in the hamlet of Haut-Vernet, twenty-five inhabitants, more than a kilometer from the village.
According to initial evidence from two testimonies, the child 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, ”the public prosecutor of Digne-les-Bains, Rémy Avon, said on Sunday during a press conference held at Vernet. The investigation, opened on Sunday to find the causes of the disappearance, was entrusted to the research section of the Marseille gendarmerie, supported by the research brigade of the Digne-les-Bains gendarmerie.
