Suspicious car with blood on the front is discovered by police hunting for missing Emile

Blood has been found on the front of a car in the Alpine hamlet from where a two-year-old boy disappeared four days ago, detectives said today.

The traces have been sent away for scientific analysis to see if they might be linked to Émile, the missing child.

‘At the moment we don’t even know if it’s human blood,’ said an investigating source.

‘It might be a very old trace too, so everybody is being very cautious about the find.’

Investigators also confirmed that Émile’s parents’ home in the southern town of La Bouilladisse, near Marseille, was searched by police on Monday.

‘Gendarmes were looking into the family’s background,’ said one judicial source working on the case.

He said that the parents had lived in the house for a year, along with Émile and his baby sister, who was born earlier this year.

‘They are a very traditional family – high Catholics who prefer the Latin mass to the modern one,’ said the source. ‘The parents are passionate about sacred church music.’

Police revealed there were at least ten other family members staying in the Vernet house at the time of Émile’s disappearance.

A police source said: ‘A family reunion was taking place, with several uncles and aunts of the child, of all ages, including some minors. Émile was seen on Saturday morning, along with other children.’

And today, residents of the French countryside hamlet of Haut Vernet where the boy went missing on Saturday referred to their home as a cursed ‘village of the damned’ because of its links with disaster.

‘Gendarmes were looking into the family’s background,’ said one judicial source working on the case

It came as police revealed there were at least 10 other family members staying in the Vernet house at the time of Émile’s disappearance

In March 2015, Vernet was cordoned off following a horrific air crash in which 150 people died, including two babies.

Germanwings Airbus A320 was deliberately brought down by co-pilot Andres Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies.

Many Vernet residents took part in high mountain searches for possible survivors at the time, opening their homes to family and friends of those who perished in the disaster.

In 2008, local cafe manager Jeannette Grosos, who ran the Café du Moulin, was brutally killed by a customer.

And the kind of phone tracing methods now being deployed by the police in their search for Emile helped snare the killers of British peer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, in nearby countryside in 2005.

He went missing in France in November 2004, before his lifeless body was found at the bottom of a ravine in the foothills of the Alps, near Cannes.

Phone triangulation later placed his estranged wife, Jamila M’Barek, and her brother, Mohamed M’Barek, in the area, and both were later convicted of Lord Shaftesbury’s murder.

But French police have admitted they ‘have no clues’ in the ongoing hunt for two-year-old Emile, resorting to searching haystacks and checking local phone records as they try to locate the boy who has been missing since Saturday. 

One resident of Vernat said on Wednesday: ‘Everybody is saying it – Vernet feels like a village of the damned.’ 

Police vans are seen arriving in the region to continue the search for Emile

Emile, who usually lives with his parents near Marseille, was last seen by two people as he left his grandparents’ home. He was on holiday with the elderly couple. 

Speaking at a news conference late yesterday, public prosecutor Rémy Avon told journalists: ‘At the moment we have no clue, no information, no element that can help us understand this disappearance’. 

He reassured the press that ‘the investigation continues’, but stressed that no progress has been made since Sunday.

‘We are at the same point as the day before yesterday after receiving the two testimonies’, Avon said. ‘We are really pushing the investigations on the ground as much as we can’.

Avon had earlier said that as well as the physical search, investigators were also looking at details like local phone records to determine ‘what phone calls were made, by whom and to whom’, around the time of the disappearance, as well as what mobile phones were connected to local towers.

‘All possible explanations are on the table, we’re not favouring any, and we’re not ruling any out,’ Avon said.

It comes after police said the toddler could be dead and his killer may have taken away his body after accidentally hitting him ‘with a car or tractor’ – in a chilling echo of BBC drama The Missing.

The search has continued today with a helicopter taking flight to broadcast the voice of Emile’s mother across the region in an attempt to find her missing son. 

The search is to be extended further tomorrow, after the hamlet of Haut-Vernet was closed off to non-residents. Investigators are also working on the telephone boundary to identify people who would have passed near the hamlet at the time of the disappearance. 

The extended search will see the number of investigators increase from 15 to 20 and the search upgraded to ‘national’ as opposed to ‘regional’.

According to Le Parisian, investigators have received 1,200 calls after putting out a call for witnesses.  

After days of thorough searches involving 800 gendarmes, firefighters, volunteers, helicopters, thermic camera drones, and sniffer dogs, police have admitted that they need to consider other possibilities. 

‘Either the body was concealed after an accident, or it was removed’, a gendarmerie spokesperson said, adding that sniffer dogs would have found a body in the region by now.

‘It is obvious that, after 48 hours, we have switched to another dimension. Hearings are underway,’ the gendarmerie spokesperson said, referring to interviews being carried out with residents and potential witnesses.’ 

Today, Avon told reporters: ‘Medically we are told that beyond a period of 48 hours, given the young age of the child, given his constitution’, and the possibility that he will be deprived of water and food with the current heat , ‘the vital prognosis is very very committed’.

According to La Provence, officials are investigating whether Emile could have been hit by car or a tractor, and his body taken away.

A group of gendarmes are looking for little two-year-old Emile in a steep area just outside Le Vernet in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence

Volunteers take part in a search operation for two-and-a-half-year-old Emile who is reported missing

French gendarmes take part in a search operation for two-and-a-half-year-old Emile who is reporting missing

‘Of course, we still have hope of finding him alive, but elsewhere. If he was dead in the perimeter, the dogs would have smelled him,’ Le Point reported the spokesperson as saying.

‘If he was alive and hidden, we would also have found him given the means that were deployed.’

On Tuesday morning, airborne searchers were given a recording of the mother’s voice to play ‘as loud as possible’ from speakers on the aircraft.

‘Their hope is that Emile will be hidden in the countryside, and will come out when he hears his mother’s voice coming from a helicopter,’ said an emergency services source.

‘Emile was always chasing butterflies, and could have got a long way away, before hiding somewhere for a nap,’ the source added.

In the hope of finding any possible leads, police are also speaking to Emile’s devout Catholic mother, who has appealed for prayers for her son and his safe return. 

Police are also exploring another hypothesis that Emile could have been kidnapped – despite ruling out any suggestion that he was abducted just 24 hours ago. 

‘He is two-and-a-half years old, he was able to walk quite a distance. But, all the hunts we have done for the past two days should have allowed us to locate him,’ said Marc Chappuis, the police officer in charge of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence where Emile went missing on Saturday afternoon.

With regard to treating the disappearance as a kidnapping, Avon, the public prosecutor told the same press conference: ‘All the hypotheses remain valid, none is favoured or excluded.’

‘We are committed to carrying out investigations on all levels’.

After three days, the two-year-old is still nowhere to be found after police carried out searches of the 20 or so houses in the small Alpine hamlet.

As fears grow, the public prosecutor stressed that as of yet ‘no element characterises a criminal offence likely to be at the origin of this disappearance.’

‘From the moment there is no offence, there is no person implicated,’ he repeated.

Volunteers are looking for Emile who was playing in the garden of his grandparents’ house in a hamlet just outside Le Vernet in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence between Grenoble and Nice when he vanished

A French gendarme takes part in a search operation for two-and-a-half-year-old Emile who is reported missing for two days

Chappuis confirmed at the press conference that the search system was to be adapted for Tuesday to be ‘more targeted’.

Police had already expanded the three-mile search area on Monday after finding no trace of the boy. A helicopter, thermic camera drones, and sniffer dogs were all brought in to help.

‘We remain present on the ground,’ Chappuis said. ‘We deploy specialised means in search of traces and clues and we respond to the needs of the judicial investigation.’

Avon also confirmed that, despite witnesses coming forward, no new element ‘likely to be able to explain the disappearance of little Emile’ has so far been brought forward.

Emile was playing in the garden of his grandparents’ home in the hamlet of Haut-Vernet in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence on Saturday afternoon when he vanished.

His parents – who have not been named – remained at their home near Marseille, 200 miles away, for the summer holidays. 

The family was getting ready to leave the house they were staying in when Emile took advantage of the inattention, officials said. His grandparents came to put him in the car and found that he had gone.

The grandparents then alerted the authorities of Emile’s disappearance at around 5.15pm [4.15pm BST] on Saturday, at which point family members, police, emergency service workers, and local villagers started the search for the boy

The initial 5km search area for the Emile has today been extended with a helicopter, thermic camera drones, and sniffer dogs all brought in to help

Emile was last seen playing in the garden at his grandparents’ house on July 8 as people now search for him

Volunteers take part in a search operation for two-and-a-half-year-old Emile who is reported missing for two days

Marie-Laure, who co-runs the only bar in nearby Le Vernet, said: ‘We were preparing for the evening service, when we were told the child had gone missing.

‘We all went to see what we could do to help as quickly as possible. We have looked in places where he could be, we have really looked everywhere for him.’

Police have so far carried out a search of all houses in the village, and have called upon anyone with any information to come forward.

Releasing a photo and description of a child to social media and broadcasters, officials said he had brown eyes, blond hair, and is 90cm (almost 3ft) tall.

They said he was wearing a yellow top, white shorts with a green pattern, and hiking shoes at the time of his disappearance.