The death of Emile Soleil, a two-and-a-half year old boy who went missing in a French Alpine village last summer, remains unexplained despite the discovery of his skull by a walker at the weekend, the prosecutor said on Tuesday.
The skull and teeth found so far “do not indicate what the cause of the death of Emile was,” Aix-en-Provence prosecutor Jean-Luc Blanchon told reporters.
He added that so far “between a fall, manslaughter and murder no hypothesis can be given greater precedence above another to explain the death.”
But he revealed that some of the boy’s clothes had been found close to where the skull had been discovered by the walker — a T-shirt, the boy’s shoes and his shorts — and these would be examined.
“No injury ante mortem (before death) was observed on the skull,” he added, saying there were marks that could have been caused after death by animals who are present in the area.
Blanchon said that investigations on the ground around where the skull was found would continue “probably tomorrow”.
Emile Soleil was at the summer home of his grandparents in the tiny hamlet of Le Haut-Vernet when he vanished in July.
