French police are engaged in an extensive air and land search for a missing two-year-old boy who disappeared from a village in the south of the country at the weekend.
The toddler, Émile, was playing in the garden of his grandparents’ house in a hamlet just outside Le Vernet in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence between Grenoble and Nice when he vanished on Saturday afternoon.
“The family was getting ready to leave the house to go on an outing. He took advantage of this fleeting moment [of inattention] to leave,” François Balique, the mayor of Le Vernet, told French television. “His grandparents realised he was no longer there when they went to put him in the car.”
Balique said the boy was a good walker for his age and there was no suggestion he had been abducted. “It’s a small village with 20 or so houses … we see everything,” he said. “He could have gone some distance and perhaps got lost or was hiding.”
Police, gendarmes and firefighters were joined by family members and villagers after the grandparents alerted them to Émile’s disappearance at about 5.15pm local time. Search and rescue teams using a helicopter, drones equipped with thermic cameras and sniffer dogs have combed the area since, but no trace of the child has been found despite covering more than 1,200 acres.
Locals said the boy, from the Bouches-du-Rhône department around Marseille, was spending the summer holiday with his grandparents in Haute Vernet, a hamlet up a winding road from Le Vernet with a population of 25 people. The valley surrounded by forests is popular with hikers.
Rémy Avon, the public prosecutor, said two people had seen the boy leaving the grandparents’ home. “Then we lose trace of him.”
Marie-Laure, who co-runs the bar-bistrot in Le Vernet, said: “We were preparing for the evening service, when we were told the child had gone missing. We all went to see what we could do to help as quickly as possible. We have looked in places where he could be, we have really looked everywhere for him,” she told La Provence newspaper.
On Monday morning, the search zone was enlarged. The gendarmerie has issued an appeal for witnesses who may have seen the boy, who was wearing white shorts and a yellow top.
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