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Four people, including Emile Soleil’s grandparents, have been arrested for the disappearance and death of the two -year -old boy in the French Alps in July 2023.
The other two people arrested under suspicion of voluntary homicide and concealment of a corpse are adult children of Emile’s grandparents, prosecutors said in a statement.
The grandparents’ lawyer, Isabelle Colombani, told AFP on Tuesday morning that he had no comments, since “he has just heard” about development.
Last year, some of the child’s bones and clothes were found by a hiker near the House of Emile’s maternal grandparents in the French Alps, where the child had disappeared the previous summer.
But prosecutors at that time said the remains offered no more clues about the cause of Emile’s death, adding that it could have been as a result of “a fall, homicide or murder.”
Tuesday’s sudden turn, in a case that seemed to have cooled, was news in France, where Emile’s search has been widely covered by the media. When the child disappeared, dozens of journalists went to Haut-Bernet, often exceeding the 25 residents of the small Alpine village.
Emile’s last sighting had been on July 8, 2023, when two neighbors saw him walking alone in the only street of the town.
The police were alerted by his grandmother shortly after. Hundreds of people joined the police, tracked dogs and the military in a search the next day.
Initially, the French reports focused on Emile’s grandfather, but his lawyer said he expected the researchers not to “waste too much time to the detriment of other lines of research.”
Emile’s remains were found days after the police summoned 17 people, including members of Emile’s family, neighbors and witnesses, to rebuild the final moments before the child disappeared.
The funeral of the child took place in February this year. Shortly after, his maternal grandparents said that “silence had made space for truth” and that they could no longer “live without answers.”
“We have had 19 months without a single certainty. We need to understand, we need to know,” they said.
In a statement, the chief prosecutor of Aix-en-Provence, Jean-Luc Blachon, said that Tuesday’s arrests were the result of investigations carried out in recent months, and that the police were examining “several points in the area.”
The French media reported on Tuesday that the grandparents’ house in the Provence region was being registered and that the police had seized one of their vehicles.
In France, people can be arrested for questions while the police investigate whether they may have been involved in a crime. It does not mean that legal procedures will necessarily begin against them.
