Complex investigations 18 years after the fact.
The excavations carried out since Monday in the Ardennes in search of the remains of Estelle Mouzin, alleged victim at nine years of Michel Fourniret, ended Thursday, we learned from a source close to the file.
At the beginning of the afternoon, the gendarmerie device deployed in the village of Issancourt-et-Rummel was lifted, and access to the land excavated since Monday, in the communal wood, reopened, noted journalists from the 'AFP.
Two excavators had continued to level the ground there since the morning.
Monique Olivier, the ex-wife and accomplice of the serial killer, who had guided the research since Monday, for her part left the gendarmerie of Sedan at the beginning of the afternoon, about fifteen kilometers away, where she was heard from the morning, without a statement from his lawyers, AFP journalists noted.
She returned to her place of detention, according to a source close to the file.
Read also Estelle Mouzin affair: the confidences of Monique Olivier to her fellow inmates
The lawyers, Monique Olivier and the Mouzin family, Me Richard Delgenes and Didier Seban, had initially indicated that these searches were to last a week.
They had been engaged Monday on this portion of the communal wood, previously deforested, on the indications of Monique Olivier, who had for the first time recognized on April 1 her participation in the kidnapping of the girl, kidnapped in 2003 on the way to the school in Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne).
Already five excavation operations in the Ardennes
The accomplice of the serial killer had indicated to have deposited her ex-husband on a road in this wood on a Saturday in January 2003, so that he made the body of Estelle disappear.
The site is located some 4 km from Ville-sur-Lumes, where, according to Monique Olivier, Fourniret kidnapped, raped and killed the girl, in a house belonging to her sister.
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Disappearance of Estelle Mouzin: who is Monique Olivier, Fourniret's ex-wife?
Sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of seven young women or adolescent girls between 1987 and 2001, "the ogre of the Ardennes" had ended up confessing in March 2020 his responsibility in the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin, after being implicated by Monique Olivier.
Before the research in the woods of Issancourt-et-Rummel, five excavation operations have followed one another since June in the Ardennes, at various other sites.
The investigators hoped this time to have a "very serious track", had underlined Tuesday Me Seban, while noting, like Me Delgenes, that the outcome of the research, 18 years after the facts, also depended however on a "luck" factor.