Australian arrested for questioning over disappearance of French boyfriend
French Police have arrested an Australian woman for questioning over the disappearance of her younger boyfriend three years ago following a hiking trip in Andorra.
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A 59-year-old Australian woman has been arrested in France for questioning over the mysterious disappearance of her 25-year boyfriend three years ago from a mountain town in Europe.
The woman, whose name has not been released, was arrested when she returned to Paris last month, three years after Florent Gregoire vanished. No body has been found.
The pair had spent a month hiking and enjoying the mountain air in Andorra, which borders France and Spain.
Hotel staff said they looked like any happy loving couple and the significant age gap was masked because the Australian, of Indonesian origin, didn’t look her age. They said few noticed that her companion, Florent Gregoire, was thirty years her junior. But when their holiday in the tiny country that straddles the border between France and Spain was over, in September 2016, Grégoire checked out of the hotel and was never seen again.
His lover is now in jail in France after she was arrested as she got off a plane in a Paris airport late last month, and was under investigation for his abduction and imprisonment. It is feared that he is dead.
“They looked like a very normal couple. I never heard them argue,” the manager of the Roser hotel in the town of Escaldes in Andorra told News Corp.
It costs around 50 euros a night to stay at the 45-room, six-storey hotel. It lies on a steep road with snow-capped peaks crowding the horizon, as they do in all of Andorra, a principality of 80,000 people that has grown rich on skiing, financial services, and duty-free shopping. Grégoire, who is from the French city of Nantes, had travelled there with his new Australian friend in the late summer of 2016, sources close to the enquiry said.
He had recently given up his job as a computer technician to try WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which consists of working on a farm in exchange for room and board. The couple spent a few months together, travelling to Spain and finally ending up in Andorra, where they checked into the Roser hotel.
“They went out most days dressed in hiking gear,” said the manager, who asked not be named.
“The woman would talk to me using a translation app on her phone. But it was usually just to say hello or something like that. She spoke in English to the man.”
It was in late September 2016 that Grégoire’s parents began to get worried about their son, who usually kept in frequent contact but who had not been in touch for a couple of weeks.
He had also not turned up at a wedding in France which he had said he would attend.
The parents contacted police in Andorra to ask for help. Officers were sent to the hotel and ascertained, after viewing video footage from the CCTV camera in the lobby, that he had left the premises on September 12, 2016 with his luggage. They then checked with bus companies and discovered that he had bought a ticket for a bus to the French city of Toulouse.
It is unclear where or when the Australian had gone. Police in Andorra were satisfied that the young man was alive when he supposedly left Andorra, apparently on his own, and no formal police inquiry was begun there.
In early October the worried parents travelled to the mountain state and met their son’s much older friend, whom they initially did not suspect of having they did not believe at the time had anything to do with his disappearance.
“She told them she had returned to her hotel room one day and he was gone. And that she had found traces of blood on the bathroom sink,” a source close to the inquiry said.
Hotel staff did not confirm that blood was found on the sink.
The increasingly fraught parents took the matter up with French police. The case was never made public in the media because, it is believed, French police hoped that the Australian would one day return to France and they would be able to detain and question her.
They were convinced that something was amiss because the woman had remained in contact with her former lover’s family, emailing them to say he was fine, sources said. On occasion they would receive emails purportedly from Gregoire himself, sources said, and even occasionally allegedly faking emails from Grégoire himself, sources said.
The bizarre affair disappearance finally made it into the French newspapers last week, when it was revealed that the Australian had been detained when she got off a plane in Paris on November 28 after a flight from Lisbon.
The woman, who has told police she is doing a doctorate in architecture, was taken into custody and transferred to a detention centre in Nantes, Grégoire’s home town, where the city’s prosecutor has taken charge of the case.
The prosecutor declined a request for information on the case.
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The suspect has been placed under formal investigation for kidnap and false imprisonment. There appears to be little hope that Grégoire will be found alive.
The Australian’s lawyer, Simon Despierre, noted that his client has no criminal record and refused to speculate on why she is being charged only with abduction and not with more serious crimes relating to Gregoire’s presumed death. murder.
“Those are the big questions. The only thing we know is that he is still missing,” he said.
She denies any wrongdoing in the case, her lawyer said.