Abducted in 2011, Camille Chauvet, aged 5 during her abduction, was found in Switzerland, we learned on Monday March 14. She was placed under the responsibility of the organization responsible for child protection in the canton of Vaud.
[Mis à jour le 14 mars 2022 à 15h43] It was a publicly known parental abduction. Abducted in the Var, in the small town of Carqueiranne and taken to an unknown destination by her military engineer mother in 2011, Camille Chauvet has never been seen since. The mystery is partially lifted on March 1, 2022, when Priscilla Majani, her mother, was apprehended in the canton of Vaud -located in the west of Switzerland- during a simple police check on the road, as revealed Var-Morning this March 14. By checking his identity papers, the Swiss police made the link, understanding that this was a person on file. She was temporarily imprisoned in the Tuilière prison in Lonay, until an extradition procedure was initiated, but above all until the investigation was carried out. Camille Chauvet has meanwhile been placed under the responsibility of the organization responsible for child protection in the canton of Vaud, but we do not know at the moment for how long. A hearing will be held to determine whether this measure should be extended. Alain Chauvet, Camille’s father, was informed that she had been found through his lawyer, Me Olivier Ferri. After this long wait, he said he was “ready to let go of everything, it’s so heavy”, as he confides in an interview with Var-Matin on March 14.
Priscilla Majani’s place of flight (or even residence) has never been discovered, despite all the wanted notices posted in airports or police stations and the search form on her mother distributed by Interpol. We do not know anything about the course of these 11 years. The reasons for the kidnapping were also unclear: his mother had tried to obtain his custody, in vain, before Alain Chauvet, his ex-husband, obtained it, all while the parents were in the process of divorce. . She is already well known to the courts since she was tried three times by the Toulon judicial court, and sentenced to a total of six years in prison for “non-representation of a minor”, “slanderous denunciation”, and “subtraction of ‘child”.
In 2011, little Camille Chauvet was kidnapped by her mother in Carqueiranne, in the Var. Her father, who had seen her for the last time in December 2010, at Christmas, had not heard from her since. After several requests from Alain Chauvet, the police were interested in the entourage of the mother and the family in order to obtain some answers. But the relatives heard remained silent. Adelheid and Lucille Majani, respectively Camille’s grandmother and aunt, were questioned on numerous occasions. The first trial was that of the Criminal Court of Lyon in November 2016: they underwent long interrogations there, the two women having long been suspected of having brought their complicity during the kidnapping. The investigation had established that they had participated in the “evaporation” of the mother with her daughter, in particular by settling her accounts and her current affairs such as the lease or the move, as detailed Var-morning. For “complicity in child abduction”, the grandmother was sentenced to two years in prison, six months of which was suspended, and the aunt to two years, one of which was suspended.
In September 2018, history repeated itself when the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal reopened the case after the two women challenged the 2016 convictions by pleading for an acquittal. Still suspected of having participated in the “social disappearance” of Priscilla Majani, they once again denied the allegations. The trial thus resulted in no concrete revelation or confession, and Lucille Majani even benefited from an acquittal, while her mother, Adelheid, saw the quantum of her sentence reduced on appeal. In May 2021, a third trial took place, at the end of which Adelheid Majani, 85, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, 6 of which were suspended for having helped his daughter to disappear with the child.
From the start, Alain Chauvet assured that he was convinced that they knew where his daughter was, but that they were silent to cover the mother. He justified these accusations mainly by the fact that they never warned the police to start a search, and this since the beginning of the kidnapping. But the two women remained silent, refusing to give any information. Alain Chauvet has become a figure in the cause of fathers deprived of “parental equality”, becoming an activist for the SOS Papa association which demands the generalization of joint custody when parents separate. “I suffered all the blows until the outright kidnapping of my daughter, through sordid accusations”, he confided in March 2018 to Var Matin. These accusations, mainly of “pedophilia” and “rape”, have been the subject of complaints by Priscilla Majani. They have since been denied by the expertise carried out by the Toulon prosecutor’s office. He thus fought for 11 years to find his daughter who was living in hiding with a mother considered unstable.