Subject of an accusatory photomontage, the mayor of Le Vernet, the town where little Émile disappeared, has decided to file a complaint.
This is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The mayor of Le Vernet, a commune in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence to which is attached the now sadly famous hamlet of Haut-Vernet where little Émile mysteriously disappeared on July 8, 2023, decided to file a complaint on Saturday for public insult and defamation against a person in a position of public authority, reveals BFM DICI.
The cause is a photomontage that circulated on social media throughout the weekend of September 21 and 22. It shows the mayor in prison. Next to him, a photo of little Émile, 2 and a half years old, whose bones were discovered at the end of March 2024 by a walker, not far from where he disappeared. In the caption of this photomontage, a sentence directly accuses the mayor of Le Vernet of the tragedy: “Yes, it was me who accidentally killed Émile,” we can read.
“I decided not to let it go”
Interviewed by BFM DICI, the mayor, François Balique, explains: “This is not the first time that such unworthy things have circulated. This time, I decided not to let it go.” According to information from the local branch of the continuous news channel, the elected official would not be the only one in this situation. A relative of little Émile’s grandparents and resident of Le Vernet would also have been the subject of accusations. A second complaint should a priori be filed by this resident of Le Vernet.
An investigation to find the person behind the publication featuring the mayor has in any case been opened by the gendarmerie. This case resembles a precedent. Émile’s grandfather had himself been targeted by defamatory remarks on Facebook. A woman will be tried in June 2025.
Where is the Émile affair?
On September 6, the Aix-en-Provence public prosecutor’s office revealed that “no leads [n’était] “dismissed to date” in the case of little Émile. Five months after the discovery of bones and clothes belonging to the child, expert reports were “still in progress”, relayed The Parisian. If the bone analyses were a priori completed, TF1 Info indicated, still at the beginning of September, that the results of the expert assessment of the boy’s clothing would be known in mid-October. To date, the accident theory has not been excluded, just like the criminal theory which is still being studied by investigators.