Investigators cannot yet determine the cause of death of little Émile, the two-year-old boy. disappeared last July and some of its bones were found last Saturday.
“The cause of death remains unclear (…) No hypothesis can be preferred over the others,” admitted the current state of the investigation this Tuesday, the public prosecutor of Aix en Provence (southeast), Jean Luc Blachon, responsible for the investigation.
Blachon held a press conference to assess the status of the investigation, in which he explained this in detail The little boy’s skull showed bite marks.with “small postmortem fractures and cracks.”
On the other hand, “no ante-mortem trauma was observed,” he stated, although he admitted that the bones found had been exposed to the elements and temperature fluctuations “for a long time.” They do not allow us to provide information about the cause of death.
He added that about 150 meters from where some bones were found, some clothes that the child was wearing on the day of his disappearance were found: a t-shirt, socks and pants.
Émile Soleil disappeared without a trace last July while he was staying with his family at a summer residence in the small town of Haut Vernet, which lies at 1,200 meters above sea level and is surrounded by forests and mountains.
The prosecutor explained that the woman who found the remains last Saturday was taking a tour of the area along a narrow path that she had passed a month ago without noticing anything.
It is an area about a 25-minute walk from where Émile disappeared, a place with a “severe slope” and “a lot of vegetation” in summer, he added.
The prosecutor indicated that the area was within the perimeter where several raids were carried out last summer, but admitted that it could not be guaranteed that “every square meter” of the marked area would then be covered, and he dared to do so The high temperatures could have affected the work of the sniffer dogs.
The prosecutor emphasized that the investigation would continue “with the same intensity on site” and also in the laboratory, since “the elements found have not yet been fully analyzed.”