© AFP
The grandfather of Emile, the two-year-old boy who disappeared without a trace last summer, has been interrogated in the past as part of an investigation into violence against minors. However, according to French media, there is no link between the man’s past and the disappearance of his grandson.
Émile disappeared on July 8, 2023 in Haut-Vernet, a village in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department. He had just arrived for the summer holidays at the holiday home of his grandparents on his mother’s side. His grandfather, Philippe Vedovini, had custody of the boy at the time.
The man was interrogated in 2018 – before Emile’s birth – as part of a judicial investigation into violence against minors. Vedovini was a teacher and monitor at the Catholic institution Le village d’enfants de Riaumont for a time in the early 1990s. Years later, former students accused the man of physical violence.
Vedovini is said to have denied those accusations at the time. “I never handed out physical punishment,” BFMTV quotes the police report of the interrogation. Although he admits a little later when asked whether he was ever violent during that period: “I kicked and sometimes I hit, but that didn’t happen often.”