Disappearance of Emile: the contradictory versions of the two witnesses sow doubt: Femme Actuelle Le MAG

45 days, and still no trace of Emile. A month and a half without the slightest answer to this question: what could have happened to this little boy, only two years old? As a reminder, the child disappeared on Saturday July 8, 2023 in Haut-Vernet, an isolated hamlet in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence where he spent his holidays with his maternal grandparents. Since then, nothing. Drones, dogs, helicopters, rescue workers… All the means made available by the prosecutor’s office came to nothing. From now on, the investigators no longer seem to have any hope of finding Emile alive. Moreover, the legal procedure has just been reclassified as “arbitrary kidnapping, arrest, detention, and sequestration of a 15-year-old minor” by the public prosecutor of Aix-en-Provence, as revealed The Parisian Monday August 21. In addition, the family of the little boy is a civil party in this case, in order to have access to the file and to have the possibility of being represented by a lawyer in the event of a future trial.

One claims to have seen Emile going down the street, and the other going up it: who is telling the truth?

Much of the investigation into Emile’s disappearance rests on the testimonies of two residents, who claim to have seen the child in a village street around 5:15 p.m.. But we now learn that the versions of these witnesses contradict each other, which could change everything. In an article published on August 8, 2023, The New Detective raises this point essential to the investigations. Our colleagues have retraced in great detail the day of July 8. At the end of the afternoon, the little boy played in the yard while the adults of the family loaded the car. As they leave, they realize that Emile is no longer there. “He is neither in the house nor in the garden. So he would have left the property? Two residents confirm. They say they saw Émile walking alone in the street, about ten meters from the gate”remember THE New Detective. The witnesses in question were not worried, since the hamlet of Haut-Vernet is a safe and isolated place which ends in a cul-de-sac. “You have to trudge on foot, in the mountains, to reach the next road below. Passing cars are very rare and the kids play outside in complete freedom.”

But this is where things get complicated. Because as our colleagues reveal, “the problem is that these two witnesses contradict each other”. Indeed, “the first, a retiree, says he saw the toddler go down to the center of the hamlet” while the second, a 16-year-old teenager, “thinks rather to have seen it go up, towards the mountainous paths”. Two different pieces of information that call everything into question. Which of the two should we trust? Is it a lack of memory, or a concern for temporality? Could one of them have mistaken it for another child? Will the investigators manage to disentangle the true from the false? For their part, the Saint-Hubert dogs requisitioned during the searches would have lost track of the little boy near a small fountain in the village, located about sixty meters from the family home. It remains to be seen whether this information will make it possible to advance the investigations, or on the contrary, will only add a new dose of uncertainty to this complex investigation.