Drones, specialized dogs and anthropologists, etc. Nine months after the disappearance of little Emile, in Haut-Vernet, a village in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, investigators finally have something to work on after the discovery of the child’s skull by a hiker this Saturday.
The gendarmerie, which is carrying out investigations under the authority of the Aix-en-Provence public prosecutor’s office, where prosecutor Jean-Luc Blachon will hold a press conference this Tuesday at 6 p.m., has been deployed since Sunday and sealed off the town . And to try to elucidate this currently very mysterious death, the best of scientific and investigative technicians came down from Pontoise, in the Paris region, where the headquarters of the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie is located. (IRCGN).
Model the crime scene
In difficult weather, the drone operators were still able to “model the crime scene, which allows its virtual reconstruction and to establish an inventory of the situation on the ground”, explains to 20 minutes the police station. The interest of this modeling is in particular to “be able to then verify the consistency of the declarations”.
In addition to authorizing investigators to continue their work from the premises of the IRGCN, this modeling will be of interest in the event of a trial in an assize court where the jurors will have available the images of the Vernet and the crime scene at sketch location.
A team of anthropologists is also dispatched to the site and will be responsible for making the bones speak. Like archaeologists and borrowing some of their techniques, the latter also have the mission of methodically excavating the places where the bones of little Emile were discovered, hoping to uncover clues or at least understand how the body got there.
All our information on the Emile affair
Finally, dogs specializing in the search for human remains arrived from Gramat, in the Lot, while for the moment, the skeleton of the little boy remains incomplete and a total mystery. In all, around fifteen criminal technicians work in the area, in addition to the numerous gendarmes mobilized to cordon off the perimeter.