French police fear two-year-old Émile unlikely to have gone missing alone

Investigators are focusing on the possibility of a criminal offence after the search for a two-year-old who wandered from his grandparents' home in the French Alps was called off.

Police have collected data from their 1,000-acre search and will now analyse their findings, including telephone calls that will be cross-checked with trips around the village at the time of the toddler's disappearance.

The search began on Monday when the child, identified only by his first name, Émile, went missing from the small village of Le Vernet, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, on Saturday.

Since then, hundreds of police officers, firefighters, and volunteers have scoured the area, sniffing dogs were deployed, and helicopters were mobilised with thermal imaging cameras.

But authorities have been left baffled, as no trace of the boy has been found despite days of searching around the tiny village.

During a press briefing on Thursday, the prosecutor of Digne-les-Bains, Rémy Avon, indicated no theory is being ruled out while police probe the possibility that a crime has taken place.

Jacques Morel, a gendarmerie general, told French TV channel BFMTV: "We will probably have to admit that he could not get out of this area on his own without the help, the complicity... of a third party."

The young boy's grandparents found him missing when they went to load him into the car.

They raised the alarm at 5.15pm local time and the community quickly gathered a large search force.

A voice-recording featuring the boy's mother was also broadcast in the area.

The tiny village, of around just 20 houses, has been described as "cursed" after Émile's disappearance became Le Vernet's third high-profile incident in the area recent years.

Jeanette Grosos, the owner of Café du Moulin, was beaten to death by a well-known customer in 2008.

Then in 2015, Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona Airport bound for Duesseldorf crashed into the Alps, just two miles from Le Vernet.

Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 28, brought down the Airbus intentionally in a suicide plan.

A commemorative plaque now stands in the village after all 150 people on board were killed.

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