Fears mount over missing girl
Speculation is rife in Switzerland over the disappearance a week ago of a five-year-old girl and the subsequent suicide of a 67-year-old man.
On Monday police said initial DNA tests showed a link between the belongings of the girl, Ylenia, and the chief suspect, a Swiss who had lived in Spain since 1990.
Police said investigations were also underway in Spain and Portugal, where four-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann disappeared three months ago. But they declined to comment on whether there was any link between the two cases.
At a news conference on Monday Bruno Fehr, head of the criminal police in the canton of St Gallen, addressed media speculation that the suspect could have been involved in the abduction of five youngsters in Switzerland in the 1980s.
He said even if the suspect had committed a heinous crime, he would not be tried in absentia for previous incidents.
Fehr added that Rebecca, an intercantonal commission for missing children, would reopen the earlier cases.
And he confirmed that no traces of a third party had been discovered.
Despite enormous search efforts involving dogs, divers and an army helicopter, there was still no trace of the missing girl on Monday.
“We haven’t given up hope, but we now have to expect the worst,” Fehr said.
Planned
Ylenia, from Appenzell in northeastern Switzerland, was last seen at a swimming pool on July 31, according to police, who have declined to release her surname in keeping with Swiss privacy laws.
On Tuesday evening police found her backpack, cycling helmet and scooter beside a path in the woods about 30 kilometres from the swimming pool. Fehr added that all the girl’s clothes were found inside her backpack.
On Wednesday, in the same forest, police found the body of a man who they said had shot himself in the head with a pistol.
A day earlier he had shot a 46-year-old man who was allegedly taking a nap. Despite a chest injury, the younger man managed to run out of the forest and was taken to hospital. He was discharged on Saturday.
Police said the dead man was a Swiss native who had lived in Spain with his wife since 1990. His van, which was also found in the forest, had Spanish number plates and had been seen near a swimming pool in Ylenia’s hometown on Tuesday morning, police said.
Fehr said the alleged abduction appeared to have been planned because he had been seen in the area before Ylenia disappeared.
Speculation
Missing children and child murders are rare in Switzerland and the case of Ylenia has made the frontpage of national newspapers and magazines.
Mass market newspaper Blick devoted its first six pages on Monday to the photogenic five-year-old, pointing out that this was not the first time that the suspect had made its pages for a crime involving a child: in 1961 he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for blackmail and for threatening to kidnap a businessman’s son.
The Tages-Anzeiger broadsheet reminded readers of the “countless questions that remain open” – such as the role of the 46-year-old who was shot in the forest, apparently with a different gun from the one with which the suspect killed himself. In its editorial it then reminded the media that “only solid facts are helpful” in such a situation.
Solid facts are currently at a premium but following the recent media saturation in Britain over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, editors are aware of the story’s human-interest value to readers, especially concerned parents.
“Hardly any children disappear [in Switzerland] so this is generating a lot of press coverage,” Martin Boess, head of Swiss Crime Prevention, told swissinfo.
“This is really a very special case: why it happened, how it happened and the fact that they can’t find this child – they don’t know whether she’s dead or alive.”
swissinfo
On Sunday police ended a two-day search of the home of the only suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a four-year-old British girl who went missing at a resort hotel in Portugal three months ago.
McCann vanished on May 3 after her parents left her and her two-year-old twin siblings alone in their room while they went to a restaurant inside their hotel complex in Praia da Luz, a resort town in Portugal’s Algarve region.
Her disappearance prompted an international search, and her parents have travelled throughout Europe and to the United States to publicise the effort to find her.
According to police statistics 1,593 children were reported missing in Switzerland in 2006 and 1,109 in 2005.
Most are “runaways” and are soon found.
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