A nine-year-old girl who went missing during a family wedding in the French Alps has still not been found more than 48 hours later.
The girl, Maelys de Araujo, has not been seen since around 3am on Sunday. A guest of the wedding told Le Parisien news site that Pont-de-Beauvoisin wedding ended when the DJ announced the girl couldn’t be found.
“The DJ for the evening announced on the microphone that a child had disappeared. Suddenly, everyone started searching, in the main hall and outside.
“It was anguish. To see the disappearance of a nine-year-old, that’s not nothing. We initially thought she must be asleep in a corner after a game of hide-and-seek. After an hour, as we’d found nothing, the police were alerted.”
Three different sniffer dogs lost the girl’s scent at the same spot in the carpark, regional police chief Yves Marzin said, leading to “one of the possible theories [being] that little Maelys left in a car, one way or another.”
Around 100 police officers are searching for her, with divers searching the nearby Guiers river and dog handlers backed by helicopters searching the surrounding wooded area. Most of the 180 wedding attendees have been interviewed, with police seeking to speak to an additional 70 people attending events nearby.
“Given the time that has elapsed since the disappearance of the young Maelys and given the resources that have been sadly deployed in vain to find her, the criminal possibility can no longer be ruled out,” said local prosecutor Dietlind Baudoin. The BBC reports that a kidnapping investigation has been opened.
Missing posters have been plastered around the town.
