A French couple on vacation on the island of Madeira were found lifeless. The accident trail is favored.
“Everything indicates that the couple fell several meters,” assured the police commissioner, Joao Gois, at theAFP. A week after the discovery of the two bodies, the accident was considered “the most probable hypothesis”. The bodies were found in a slippery ravine and in an “advanced state of decomposition.”
All the elements also seem to agree to confirm that it is the couple of French bakers, Véronique and Laurent Blond. Investigators discovered a shoe and a backpack with documents belonging to the couple. Originally from Tarn-et-Garonne, they had been missing since March 16 when they went hiking on the Portuguese island.
On April 4, a walker discovered the body of a woman then the next day a second body was found in the same area. The Parisian had specified that they were about twenty meters apart, near the family’s rental house.
99% chance it’s them
In Funchal, on April 4, Luis Simoes, the regional commander of the Portuguese police, explained, in the columns of the French daily, that “the clothes, the shoes and the probable date of death mean that we are 95% sure, or even 99%, that it is the missing French tourist.” The place where the first body was discovered “is an old path”, according to the spokesperson for the Portuguese police, relayed by Le Parisien. The poorly maintained path was, these days, very muddy due to the heavy rains which have fallen on the island for around ten days.
Laurent and Véronique Blond had gone on vacation with their youngest daughter, Johanna. Last week, the couple’s eldest daughter, Pauline, who had not accompanied them, had lost hope. “We have to face the facts, the chances are very slim of finding them alive,” she lamented at the microphone of BFMTV.
In France, investigations were carried out in the homes of bakers from Tarn-et-Garonne. They failed to find any element likely to explain the disappearance of the couple. An investigation into a worrying disappearance was then opened by the public prosecutor of Montauban and entrusted to the Castelsarrasin search brigade and the Beaumont-de-Lomagne gendarmerie.