A blatant investigation for “intentional homicides” was opened and entrusted to the gendarmes of the Bonneville research brigade with the support of the Chambéry research section, indicated the Bonneville prosecutor, Boris Duffau, in a press release late Tuesday , while the woman, described as depressed, remained untraceable.
The victims are “two boys aged 2 and 11 and a girl aged 13”, he specifies. Autopsies and additional assessments will be quickly carried out by the Grenoble Medico-Legal Institute (IML), but “from the first findings, it is established that the victims have stab wounds”.
“Several hearings of the close entourage of this blended family are currently underway and the mother, aged 45, is actively sought,” according to the prosecutor.
The children were discovered in a home by the father who raised the alarm, a source at the gendarmerie told AFP earlier.
Dispatched to the site around 12:30 p.m., the emergency services could only note the deaths, said the firefighters, confirming information from Dauphiné Libéré. According to the regional daily, the man who discovered the bodies is the father of the youngest child.
“The investigation continues to determine the exact circumstances of the commission of the facts,” according to the prosecutor. A medico-psychological emergency unit has been set up at Taninges town hall.
The mother, who is depressed, has been actively sought since the middle of the day, according to a gendarmerie source. She left a letter then headed for the mountains surrounding Taninges, according to Le Dauphiné Libération.
A large device including around sixty gendarmes and a helicopter were mobilized for the search, a source close to the investigation told AFP.
Gendarmes blocked access to a small isolated alley where the house where the tragedy allegedly took place is located, at the exit of the town, noted an AFP journalist on Tuesday evening. In the village there were also gendarmes from the Surveillance and Intervention Platoon (PSIG).
Criminal identification specialists left the scene around 8 p.m., shortly before a funeral home removed the bodies of the three children, AFP noted.
Taninges is a mountain commune of 3,500 inhabitants in the Giffre valley, about 50 km east of Geneva. Made up of a town center at an altitude of 600 m and several hamlets, it has a small ski resort at an altitude of 1,500 m.
Last week, two children aged one and four were found decapitated at their home in Sainte-Rose, Guadeloupe, and the mother, found wandering in the streets of the town, was interned in a psychiatric hospital.
According to the National Child Protection Observatory, 60 minors died violently within their family in 2022.
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