France: Wedding guest charged in missing girl case

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Bernard Meraud, the lawyer representing the suspect, told BFMTV channel that the DNA traces of the girl were found only because the missing child had played inside his client’s vehicle with another child.

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“His dogs were mentioned during the party so the children, as they were playing outside, came to him and asked to see his dogs in his car,” Meraud said. “He opened the door, turned over the passenger front seat, the children went on the back seat, looked inside the boot and came out. That’s it.”

The girl, identified as Maelys De Araujo by Grenoble prosecutors, was last seen on Aug. 27 at the village hall in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, 85 kilometres (53 miles) from Lyon in southeastern France.

Police have questioned more than 200 potential witnesses and hundreds of volunteers have helped searching the area, but the girl was still missing on Monday morning. Police dogs found the girl’s scent but lost it in the hall’s parking lot, suggesting she may have been forced into a vehicle or gotten into one voluntarily.

The Associated Press