“Understand our distress, tell us where Émile is,” pleaded the parents of a two and a half year old child who has been missing since July in an Alpine hamlet, in a vibrant message spoken by his mother and broadcast Thursday by the weekly Christian Family. “Please, if he’s alive, don’t let us live without him, give him back to us! Please, if he’s dead, tell us where he is, give him back to us, don’t let us not without a grave to collect us!”, declares the little boy’s mother in this message broadcast on the eve of Emile’s birthday on November 24.
“This anguish crushes our hearts”
“You can do all this in a thousand ways, even anonymously, without having to denounce yourself, but do not let us and our families live the rest of our lives with this terrible anguish that crushes our hearts,” adds -she. On July 8, 2023, at 5:15 p.m., Émile was seen for the last time by two neighbors in an alley in Haut-Vernet, a hamlet of 25 inhabitants at an altitude of 1,200 meters, on the slopes of the Trois Évêchés massif (Alps -de-Haute-Provence), where he had just arrived for the summer holidays at the second home of his maternal grandparents.
His parents, a very religious Catholic family, live in La Bouilladisse (Bouches-du-Rhône) and were not present that day. Despite numerous searches launched to find him, his disappearance has still not been clarified. At the end of July, the investigation, first entrusted to the Digne-les-Bains public prosecutor’s office then transferred to investigating judges in Aix-en-Provence, shifted to a criminal classification of “kidnapping” and “sequestration” .
A purely technical decision which is not linked to any particular progress, insists the prosecution, but which allows “more flexibility” in the investigations which have continued unabated since. In November, several homes were searched as part of the investigation.