After five days of “judicial sweeps”, little Emile remained untraceable, Thursday, July 13, in the evening in the hamlet of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence where he disappeared on Saturday, announced the prosecution, definitively ending the planned operations in the field.
Thursday morning, it was first the 1.8 km road linking the hamlet of Haut-Vernet and its twenty-five inhabitants to the village of Vernet which was combed by around fifty gendarmes from the Gap gendarmerie platoon, as well as only a strip of 10 meters on either side of this road, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) the public prosecutor of Digne-les-Bains, Rémy Avon. “This area had already been observed during the search and had been visually inspected”, insisted the magistrate, stressing that this operation was done “purely for safety”.
Then, Thursday afternoon, the gendarmes deployed in the field searched one last time “places located in the hamlet”, specified the magistrate, without giving any result. Since the opening of an investigation “to search for the causes of worrying disappearance” on Sunday morning, the 2 and a half-year-old boy has therefore still not been found.
Second phase of the investigation opened
Accident ? Homicide? Removal ? “No thesis is privileged, no thesis is excluded”, insisted again Thursday evening the prosecutor of Digne, confirming that the second phase of the investigation was now open. It consists of analyzing “the considerable mass of data” collected during these five days in Haut-Vernet, and in particular the telephone data and the 1,200 messages left on the dedicated call line.
“This is the end of the planned judicial search operations. But we will obviously come back on the spot if clues or elements collected so far lead us to have to come and check certain things or search certain places, “explained the magistrate.
In the hamlet, the thirty houses were searched, the twenty-five inhabitants questioned, all the vehicles were visited and in total, therefore, 97 hectares of fields, woods or steep terrain were “thoroughly” raked, a insisted Mr. Avon: “This is without doubt one of the most important judicial search operations ever conducted. »
From now on, the few gendarmes who will remain on site in the village will have the sole mission of locking the hamlet to the general public. Sanctuarized since Tuesday, to “protect the investigation”, a first municipal decree running until Thursday evening, Haut-Vernet will indeed be closed for a few more days and at least during this long weekend. In order to “protect families and channel any tourism of curiosity, I have extended this decree”, confirmed to AFP François Balique, the mayor of the village of Vernet.
Emile, from La Bouilladisse, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, had just arrived for the summer holidays with his maternal grandparents, in Haut-Vernet, when he was seen for the last time by two neighbors, Saturday at 5:15 p.m., alone, in an alley in the hamlet.
At the time of his disappearance, “several other family members were also present” in the house where this family has been vacationing for the past 20 years, Avon said. But neither parent, he insisted.
“Until we know the truth, it will be tense. It’s hard on the family, this uncertainty is awful,” said the mayor of Vernet on Thursday: “And the people of the village need to know what happened. »