Officers disclose discovered corpse likely belongs to Arian
A rural resident in the Stade district of Lower Saxony stumbled upon a disturbing sight: a lifeless child on a grassy expanse. The kid's identity has yet to be ascertained, yet authorities are also following up on the case of the vanished six-year-old Arian at the scene.
The farmer discovered the child's remains on a meadow in the Elm area, where operations concerning Arian had been underway. The local police have verified this information. As of now, the identity of the deceased child remains unidentified.
According to police reports, the farmer stumbled upon the corpse around 4:30 PM on a Monday during the harvest season in the village of Estorf. The specific location and details of the discovery are currently undisclosed. A crime scene unit from the Stade Police Department and the investigative team assigned to the Arian case were both present to conduct forensic examinations.
Arian, a six-year-old child from Elm, has been missing since April 22. He left his parents' home without them in the evening and was seen on surveillance footage shortly thereafter. Traces of his whereabouts faded thereafter. For a week, search and rescue teams, along with volunteers, scoured villages, fields, and forests around the clock in search of Arian. At one point, as many as 1,200 people were involved. Various resources, including drones, tracking dogs, helicopters, sonar boats, divers, and an Air Force reconnaissance jet, were also used.
Arian's extensive search came to an end in late April
Assuming Arian, who has autism, wouldn't respond to calls, the search teams attempted to coax him out of a potential hiding spot with children's music, balloons, and recordings of familiar voices. However, these efforts proved fruitless.
The extensive search for Arian ended in late April. Since then, a specialized police unit has been overseeing further measures. The last search took place on May 15, two days after Arian's disappearance. The Oste River, which flows through Bremervoerde, had already been searched multiple times up to its mouth. Recently, investigators had been considering several theories regarding what might have happened to the boy. The most probable hypothesis is that he suffered an accident without outside interference. The fact that search teams found small shoe prints along the Oste, deemed likely to be Arian's, speaks against a criminal case. The location of the found corpse is merely 7.6 kilometers from Arian's hometown.
