AN UNCLE of the Swiss twin girls who have been missing for a week said the family feared “for the worst” after they received money the girls’ father posted before he was found dead in Italy.
Dr Valerio Lucidi said the girls’ mother received €5,000 in mailings from their father before he was found dead in an apparent suicide.
Matthias Schepp threw himself under a train in southeastern Italy last Thursday, having failed to return six-year-olds Alessia and Livia to his estranged wife on January 30th.
“We fear for the worst but so long as there is no proof we remain hopeful, even if it’s slender,” said Valerio Lucidi as a three-nation search increasingly focused on Switzerland and the final weekend the children spent with their father.
“We received several letters from Italy, from the village where he [was found], with all the money he took out in Marseilles,” he told journalists outside the mother’s home in the village of St-Sulpice, on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Mr Lucidi said the family had hoped Mr Schepp had used the money to pay for childcare after the girls went missing on January 30th.
“It worries us because the theory that he might have paid someone to keep the children doesn’t hold any more,” he said.
Although Mr Schepp was sighted as he drove more than 500km to Marseilles, where he bought tickets for a ferry crossing to Corsica, police said no one reported seeing the blonde girls.
The girls were last seen playing with a neighbour’s child more than a week ago close to where they lived. – (Washington Post)