AFP, published on Friday January 24, 2020 at 04:11
The chances of finding five French disappeared alive in Quebec, two days after a snowmobile excursion that turned into drama, were almost zero Thursday evening despite extensive research carried out all day.
Police announced late in the afternoon that they had found four new snowmobiles in the same area where two others had been found the day before.
The hope of finding them alive “is dwindling as time goes by, especially with these latest discoveries,” said a police spokeswoman who joined on Thursday evening.
On the ground, search operations were lightened at nightfall, and were to resume Friday morning.
The group was made up of eight French tourists, three of whom survived, and their Canadian guide, who died, a convoy of nine craft in total. The motorcycles of two French survivors remained on the surface.
“In total, six snowmobiles were found” at the bottom of the water, in the unmarked area where the accident took place, said spokeswoman Béatrice Dorsainville.
This discovery confirms the most pessimistic hypothesis, according to which the five tourists sank in icy waters with their machine.
They were driving in an area known to be dangerous where the ice was either too thin or absent. And they probably left the marked trails to take a shortcut and reach their destination faster, according to several experts.
The Sureté du Québec published on Thursday the identities of the disappeared, originating, like the three French survivors, from eastern France. They are Gilles Claude, 58, Yan Thierry, 24, Jean-René Dumoulin, 24, Julien Benoît, 34, and Arnaud Antoine, 25.
Gilles Claude is the father of three international biathletes, Emilien, Florent and Fabien.
The latter climbed on Thursday for the first time on the podium of a stage of the Biathlon World Cup, in Pokljuka in Slovenia. He dedicated his third place to his father.
“There was a tragic accident in Canada for my father,” explained Fabien Claude on the L’Equipe television channel, accompanied by his brother Florent, also a biathlete on the Belgian team.
“This podium is for him, I am sure he is proud of us and I am proud of what I have done today. The goal was not necessarily the result, it was to pay tribute and do the best you can, “he added.
– About twenty deaths per year –
Gilles Claude was a regular snowmobile in Quebec, testified Michel Bellerose, the founder of the rental agency Haute-Matawinie, who rented the motorcycles on Monday to the French group.
“These are people we see regularly, once a year for several years,” he said, upset, on the public channel Radio-Canada. “We talked together, they are passionate. They are not tourists who knew nothing about snowmobiling.”
Throughout the day, around thirty police officers, including a dozen divers equipped with a small submarine thruster and sonars, scoured the area located east of Lac Saint-Jean, near the town of Saint -Henri-de-Taillon, about 225 km north of Quebec City. Two helicopters and drones were in support.
The accident occurred Tuesday in the early evening at the mouth of a river flowing from Lac Saint-Jean. This dangerous area, where the ice is thinner or even non-existent due to the currents, is strongly advised against by all professionals.
The river which starts from Lac Saint-Jean leads to a dam a few kilometers downstream. Due to relatively mild temperatures, it is not entirely frozen, which could make it possible to find the bodies of French people who probably fell into the water before being swept away by the current, a spokesman told AFP. of the police.
The tour guide, a 42-year-old Montrealer, was drafted Tuesday evening, but died of his injuries. Three other Frenchmen, who had raised the alarm, were briefly hospitalized for frostbite and nervous shock.
For its part, the province of Quebec, which wanted to learn from this unprecedented drama, announced Thursday that it would impose training on guides and tourists who rent these machines.
Each year, this practice kills more than twenty people on average in this province alone.
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