“It is impossible to say that Émile’s body was not located where the bones were found, in an area searched after his disappearance. A dense area, searched by strong heat which could have impaired the effectiveness of the dogs,” prosecutor Jean-Luc Blanchon immediately stated.
“The walker discovered the bones on a path that she had already walked a month earlier. A skull was found on the ground of a narrow path which follows a contour line, with very steep approaches. A very vegetated area in the summer, located 25 minutes on foot from the village”, continued the prosecutor who revealed that “near the bed of a stream likely to turn into a torrent, clothes worn by Émile on the day of his missing were found this Monday, 150 m from the trail: t-shirt, pants, shoes. But no other bones.
The skull “presents small post-mortem fractures and cracks. No ante-mortem trace. And bite marks, probably from animals. The bones were not buried and were exposed to the elements for a long time,” reveals the prosecutor, for whom “these bones alone do not allow us to say the cause of Émile’s death. The investigation will continue. The elements have not finished being analyzed. »
The skull taken by car to the gendarmerie
Only a few bones, including the skull of the two and a half year old child, were found by a hiker on Saturday, not far from the hamlet, between Digne-les-Bains and Gap. As the telephone network was not working and she was unable to notify the authorities, she took him herself to the Seyne gendarmerie, 20 minutes away by car.
This discovery took place “in an area surrounded by nature, steep and not always easy to access”, which had been inspected “several times” since July, said Marie-Laure Pezant, spokesperson for the gendarmerie, recognizing that there is “a tiny chance” that investigators missed the body during this summer’s raids.
The objective is therefore now to determine scientifically whether the body was indeed in this place as soon as the child disappeared, specified the spokesperson for the gendarmerie: the anthropologists will “try to identify whether these bones were there or if they could have been brought back by a human person, an animal, or the weather conditions.”
How is the investigation continuing?
“The search will last as long as it is necessary,” Colonel Pierre-Yves Bardy, commander of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence gendarmerie group, in charge of securing the sector where field experts, including anthropologists and dog handlers, work: “We must prevent hikers or other people from polluting the site”. All day, in the cold, under a sky that turned blue again, the investigations continued, in conditions complicated by the heavy rains of the night.