Third day of research in Quebec to find the five French disappeared in the north of Quebec during a snowmobile expedition which went wrong on Tuesday, after another night of fruitless searches.
The chances of finding them alive are now slim. On Tuesday, their snowmobiles fell to the bottom of the icy waters of Lac Saint-Jean while they were traveling on an unmarked path. Investigators say they are determined to "not give up," said a spokesperson for the Sûreté du Québec. "As long as we have not found five bodies, we are looking for five missing persons," police spokesman Hugues Beaulieu told AFP on Friday morning.
Police, divers and helicopters
As on the previous day, around thirty police officers, including a dozen divers, supported by important means such as helicopters, drones or boats equipped with sonars, will scour the east of Lac Saint-Jean where the drama. The group was made up of eight tourists from eastern France, three of whom survived, and their guide, a Montrealer who died on Wednesday of his injuries.
Of the seven snowmobiles that crossed the ice, six were found at the bottom of the water by investigators. This discovery confirms the most pessimistic hypothesis, according to which the five tourists sank in the icy waters with their machine.
They were driving in a deemed dangerous area where the ice was either too thin or absent. And they probably left the marked trails to take a shortcut and reach their destination faster, according to several experts. On Thursday, police released the identities of the missing, who, like the three French survivors, from eastern France on Thursday. One of them is the father of three international biathletes, Emilien, Florent and Fabien. The latter climbed on Thursday for the first time on the podium of a stage of the Biathlon World Cup, in Pokljuka in Slovenia. He dedicated his third place to his father.
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Biathlon: "This podium is for him", Fabien Claude pays tribute to his father who died in Quebec in the snowmobile accident
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