Road checks, door-to-door, drone, dog team: some 70 gendarmes were still deployed on Monday to find the trace of Morgane, a 13-year-old schoolgirl who had been missing for a week in the small Breton town of Pabu, where some residents are not hiding. not a feeling of anguish and helplessness.
AFP
The searches begun on November 25 after the report of this “worrying disappearance” resumed even before daybreak near the teenager’s home, Jean-Baptiste Gautier, commander of the gendarmerie company of Guingamp, which manages operations.
“This morning we checked all the people who took the teenager’s usual route” to go to school “on the assumption that these people were the vast majority of those who took it last Monday” and were able to come across Morgane , he explained.
“We were able to collect testimony from everyone, whether motorists, pedestrians, bus drivers, passengers,” continues Commander Gautier.
But she never went to the bus stop where she was supposed to take the school bus at 7:20 a.m., confirmed the Saint-Brieuc prosecutor, Nicolas Heitz, during a press briefing on Monday.
“The bus driver confirmed it, he even waited a few seconds to see her arrive, in vain,” he stressed.
“Dad, mom, sorry, I’m leaving”
The teenager, who had argued with her parents over the weekend over her excessive use of social media, also failed to show up at school.
No witnesses reportedly saw Morgane after she left her parents’ home at 7:14 a.m. that morning. And the investigators found in his basket a “crumpled paper which said ‘dad, mum, sorry, I’m leaving’”.
For the past week, the gendarmes have been carrying out neighborhood surveys, drone or helicopter overflights and probing neighboring waterways.
At the end of the morning, a team of four uniformed gendarmes were still roaming a street in Guingamp leading to Pabu in intermittent rain, stopping at each home to knock on doors and question the occupants, AFP journalists noted.
According to Nicolas Heitz, investigators have carried out 110 witness interviews since Monday in Morgane’s family, friends, school and sports circles.
“We are looking for all traces, clues, testimonies, anything that can help us move forward in our investigation” to find the schoolgirl, Commander Gautier summarizes for Pabu.
“I had nightmares about it”
Runaway gone bad? Suicide? Accident ? “At this stage, all avenues are considered, none are preferred,” assured the Saint-Brieuc prosecutor, who opened a judicial investigation so that an investigating judge could carry out the investigations.
“Is she still in Pabu? In a neighboring town or in Paris? All scenarios are possible, that’s what’s distressing,” Denise Thomas, 72, told AFP, leaving a gymnastics class.
“In the evening, when I see night falling, I say to myself: ‘where is this kid going to spend the night?’,” says the retired woman seen in the town hall square of the small town of 2,800 inhabitants. .
Her granddaughter herself was afraid at the news of this disappearance, “she didn’t want to walk to school last week: her mother had to drive her.”
“There is a feeling of helplessness too, because we would like to help, we don’t know what to do. I have a very difficult time with it, I admit,” adds a gym classmate, Claudine Connan, 72 years old.
“I had nightmares that woke me up last night!”, assures a third.
The shadow of Lina, a 15-year-old teenager who disappeared in Alsace in September 2023 and whose body was discovered more than a year later in Nièvre, looms over many conversations in Pabu, confides Denise Thomas.
“Not knowing anything, that’s what’s terrible,” concludes Claudine Connan.
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