A new fragment of bone from Emile, this boy who disappeared at the beginning of July in the hamlet of Haut-Vernet (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), was discovered near the place where the first elements had been found ago ten days. “A small piece of bone belonging to Emile was actually found in the same area as the clothes, below the skull” of the child, the prosecutor of the Republic of Aix-en-Provence, Jean-Luc Blachon, confirming information from Le Parisien.
This discovery, however, does not allow us to move forward on the cause of death, added the magistrate, stressing that the bone fragment was indeed identified by the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie (IRCGN) as belonging to the child of two and a half years old.
Nearly nine months after he vanished on July 8, when he had just arrived at his maternal grandparents' home for the summer, in Haut-Vernet, the child's skull and teeth then the clothes he was wearing on the day of his disappearance were found recently, about 1.7 km from this town of 25 inhabitants, a 25-minute walk for an adult.
Circumstances still mysterious
None of these discoveries has yet allowed investigators to elucidate the circumstances of the boy's death at this stage.
“Between the fall, manslaughter and murder, we still cannot favor one hypothesis over another,” Jean-Luc Blachon insisted on April 2, during his first speech to the press in a file from which nothing concrete had emerged until Saturday March 30 and the discovery, by a hiker, of the child's skull and teeth.
Two days later, 150 meters below the path where Emile's bones had been seen, the gendarmes found, "scattered over a few dozen meters", the child's t-shirt, shoes and pants, the magistrate explained. But, Mr. Blachon specified, the path where the first bones were discovered is located near a stream which descends from the mountain, with a “very steep slope” at this point, of around 30%. .
In other words, no one can say that Emile's skull and his clothes were there since July 8. They could have been “brought back by a human person, an animal, or the weather conditions”, as the gendarmerie spokesperson, Marie-Laure Pezant, explained on April 1. The area had in fact been searched, with tracking dogs and helicopters equipped with thermal cameras, during the searches organized just after the disappearance of the child.
