A woman's body was discovered Wednesday in a parked car in Switzerland and checks are underway to determine whether it is the mother suspected of having killed her children the day before in the village of Taninges, other side of the border.
According to information transmitted by the Swiss police to French investigators, it is indeed this 45-year-old woman, actively sought since Tuesday, two sources close to the case told AFP, confirming information from Dauphiné Libéré.
The body which was found in Champéry, a Swiss commune in the canton of Valais located approximately 70 km from Taninges in Haute-Savoie, has yet to be formally identified. The Bonneville prosecutor's office, in charge of the case, did not immediately comment.
Two boys aged 2 and 11 and a girl aged 13 were found dead on Tuesday, with stab wounds, in the house of this blended family in Taninges. Their mother, a teacher described as depressed, had been wanted since the discovery of their bodies.
A blatant investigation for “intentional homicides” had been opened while waiting for “the exact circumstances of the commission of the facts” to be clarified, indicated Tuesday evening the Bonneville prosecutor, Boris Duffau.
Autopsies and additional assessments were to be carried out by the Grenoble Medico-Legal Institute (IML).
The searches mobilized on Tuesday and Wednesday around sixty members of the police and a helicopter to search the massifs which surround this small mountain town close to the Swiss border.
Divers from Aix-les-Bains, Valence and Evian were also sent to the site to probe the water points. The device was coordinated by the Bonneville research brigade and the Chambéry research section.
In Taninges itself, the police again blocked access on Wednesday to the dead end leading to the vast chalet with a garden with barbecue and swings where the family lived, at the foot of the mountains, AFP noted.
– “Idyllic setting” –
The hamlet where the family resided, located away from the village, has only 11 inhabitants and the three young victims were the only children living there, a neighbor in a long vest told AFP from her doorstep. .
“They often rode bikes, they were cheerful,” she added, declaring herself “stunned” by these “inconceivable” murders.
These homicides caused strong emotion in this mountain town of 3,500 inhabitants in the Giffre valley, approximately 50 km east of Geneva, where a medico-psychological emergency unit was set up at the town hall.
“It was a couple who lived in a hamlet (…) a little far from the town in a somewhat idyllic setting,” mayor Gilles Péguet told AFP. “They felt good there, they have their parents, grandparents who were right next to them,” he continued, describing a family that is now “devastated”.
The mother was a teacher in a primary school in a village near Taninges, the rectorate of the Grenoble academy, which oversees five departments in the region, including Haute-Savoie, told AFP.
Two establishments where she had worked received a visit from a representative of the rectorate on Wednesday morning and a “listening unit” set up. “The resources are put in place so that staff and students can feel supported in this tragedy,” we explained to the rectorate.
