Raquel VillaécijaParis Correspondent

Paris Correspondent

Updated Monday, April 1, 2024-13:50

  • France They find the remains of Émile, the two-year-old boy who disappeared in France in July

Accidental death or crime? Investigators are trying to clear up the many doubts, but above all the main one, surrounding the death of Émile, the two-year-old boy who disappeared nine months ago in Le Vernet, a district in the south of France, and

whose remains have now appeared

. one kilometer from the town, in an area that had been searched when the minor disappeared.

A hundred gendarmes and several canine teams are working in the area where a woman found some skeletal remains of the child on Saturday. On Sunday the prosecutor's office confirmed that they are those of the minor and the Gendarmerie Criminal Investigation Institute analyzes them to try to answer the first of the unknowns:

whether the child died accidentally or not.

The little boy disappeared last July, while playing at his grandparents' house in Le Vernet, in Haute Provence. He vanished one afternoon, no one saw him, and the investigators were unable to find any clues, even though

they searched for days and combed the entire area

. Two witnesses saw him going down the street, but they did not consider it strange nor were there any details that alerted them.

From the beginning, researchers have never ruled out any hypothesis: that the child started walking and fell, that he had an accident, that he was hit by a heavy vehicle or even that he was attacked by an animal.

They also do not rule out involuntary manslaughter, nor the criminal trail.

"It is not certain that we will be able to discover the causes or circumstances of the death," gendarmerie spokesperson Marie-Laure Pezant admitted to France info. The researchers only have a part of the remains, including the skull, and are working at the site of the discovery to try to find the rest, although it is

"a steep area, in the middle of nature

, difficult to access."

Again, as happened when the little boy disappeared,

the district has been fenced, so that no one can access or leave

. One of the main mysteries is whether the remains were placed in the area afterwards, since this perimeter had been combed during the raids when Émile disappeared.

The gendarmerie spokesperson has acknowledged that there is a "tiny possibility" that, during the searches, they were not seen, despite the fact that there were also canine teams. The tests will allow us to know if the remains had been in the area for a long time or if they were displaced, by a human, by animals or even by the wind.

Precisely, last Thursday investigators summoned more than a dozen people in the district to try to reconstruct the moment in which the child disappeared. The mayor of Le Vernet, François Balique, has noted that, now that the child's remains have been found,

"the mystery moves, but we remain within the mystery."