“This area was already observed during the hunt and subjected to visual inspection,” the magistrate insisted, stressing that the move was “purely for safety.”
Later, on Thursday afternoon, the gendarmes stationed on the ground searched the last “places located in the hamlet,” the magistrate noted. Without giving any conclusion or bringing the slightest trace or clue to explain the disappearance of this two-and-a-half-year-old toddler.
After five days of work in the field, the child has yet to be found since an investigation was launched on Sunday morning “to determine the cause of the alarming disappearance”.
Is it an accident? Murder? Removal? “No thesis is privileged, no thesis is excluded”, insisted Digne’s lawyer on Thursday evening, confirming that the second phase of the trial is now open. It involves analyzing a “substantial amount of data” collected over these five days in Haut-Vernet, particularly telephone data and 1,200 messages left on a dedicated call line.
“This is the conclusion of the planned judicial search operations. But if the clues or elements collected so far lead us to go and check certain things or search certain places we will obviously come to that place,” explained the magistrate.
Little Emile’s Disappearance in Vernet: “It May Begin Again”
“Curiosity Tour”
In the hamlet, 30 houses have already been searched, 25 residents have been questioned, all vehicles have been inspected and a total of 97 hectares of fields, forests or steep terrains have been “thoroughly” cut, Mr. Avon asserted: “Undoubtedly one of the most important judicial search operations ever conducted”.
Henceforth, the few gendarmes in the village aim only to keep the hamlet locked to the general public.
Consecrated from Tuesday, the first municipal order to “protect the investigation”, running until Thursday evening, Haut-Vernet will actually be closed for a few more days and at least this long weekend. “To protect families and to include interested tourists, I have extended this decree,” confirmed AFP François Paulique, mayor of the village of Vernet.
Emile, from La Bouilladisse in the Bouches-du-Rhône, was on summer vacation in Haut-Vernet with his maternal grandparents when he was last seen by two neighbors at 5:15 p.m. on Saturday. Alone, in an alley in the hamlet.
At the time of his death, Mr. Awan said, “there were many more family members” at the home where the family had been vacationing for two decades. But parents, he didn’t insist.
Neither the battered citizens for two days, nor the gendarmes of the research division at Marseilles, nor Digne’s research force for five days made it possible to find any trace of the child.
“Until we know the truth, it will be tense. It is difficult for the family, this uncertainty is bad”, said the mayor of Vernet on Thursday: “And the villagers must know what is happening. What happened that day”.
“We searched everything, even the freezers”: Vernet resident describes search for little Emile
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