Emile Soleil dead in France – clothes found

Bone remains were found on Sunday.

Three days later, the police made the next find – children’s clothes scattered just 150 meters away.

The police still do not know what happened to 2-year-old Emile who mysteriously disappeared from a French mountain village.

The mystery of the missing boy has eluded French police for nine months.

Emile, 2, disappeared last year. Photo: The police

A breakthrough came on Sunday, when a hiker found the boy’s skull just a kilometer from the village he disappeared from. The place had previously been searched.

A few days later, the police found the t-shirt, shoes and shorts that Emile was wearing on the day he disappeared. The clothes were scattered over a small area, only 150 meters from the place where he was supposed to have been found, writes BBC.

According to the prosecutor in the case, Jean-Luc Blachon, it is still impossible to say what led to the boy’s death – despite analysis of the remains of the bones.

– A fall accident, manslaughter or murder, no theory can be handled as more likely than the other.

Blunders complicate the investigation

The analysis of the skull has shown “minor fractures” and “bite marks”, but according to the prosecutor, they could just as well have been caused by wild animals.

The place where the finds were made had previously been searched – but not by drones or special search dogs.

– At the moment, we cannot say whether Emile’s body was already in the search area. I cannot answer whether every square meter had been searched, says Jean-Luc Blachon.

The investigation has also been complicated by the fact that the hiker who found the skull picked it up himself and took it to the police.

– We would have preferred that she didn’t touch anything at all, the police said Le Figaro.

The maternal grandfather’s past raises questions

It was on July 8 that Emile visited his grandmother and grandfather in the small mountain village of Haut-Vernet in the south-east of France.

Only 25 people live in the village, reportr Le Figaro.

The witness accounts of the boy’s disappearance are conflicting, according to Le Monde.

Last week, investigators and 17 witnesses gathered in the village to reconstruct what happened that day. The entire village was cordoned off during the operation.

In several French media, the grandfather’s past has now come into focus.

In March, the newspapers reported Le Parisien and Le Canard enchaîné that the maternal grandfather, Philippe Vedovini, appeared in a police investigation into violence and sexual abuse against children at a school belonging to a Catholic community in northern France.

He is said to have been in the process of becoming a monk when he worked at the school in the early 1990s, where he was called Brother Philippe.

The word about the rumours

In a police interview from April 2018, he admitted that he had administered “somewhat harsh” physical punishment, but that he had never broken the law. He has not been charged with any crime.

Philippe Vedovini never made his oral vow. Instead, he married and had ten children, one of them the mother of Emile Soleil.

Last fall, he spoke about the rumors, which arose shortly after the grandson’s disappearance, in the Christian newspaper Famille Chrétienne.

– Of course I come across as dominant and someone who terrorises everyone. All this is fake, I don’t care, he said then.