Missing Swiss twins’ mother joins hunt in Corsica: official

The mother of missing Swiss twins whose father confessed to killing them before committing suicide was Sunday on board a police helicopter hunting for the girls in Corsica, officials said.

Irina Lucidi and her brother arrived on the French Mediterranean island on a private jet and immediately boarded a police chopper to overfly areas in the south which the father mentioned in letters he sent before he died.

The father, Matthias Schepp, confessed in one of the letters to killing Alessia and Livia Schepp before he threw himself under a train in Italy. But the mother said Saturday she had “not lost hope” of finding her children.

Police in Switzerland, France and Italy have been searching for signs of the twins after Schepp failed to return the fair-haired girls to his estranged wife on January 30. He was found dead in southern Italy four days later.

French police, who were joined by Swiss colleagues on Saturday, say Schepp had returned alone from Corsica, which he knew both from holidays and his work with a tobacco company, after travelling there with the tiwns.

They have been scouring the island between Propriano in the southwest, where Schepp arrived with the twins, and Bastia in the northeast, from where he left, apparently alone.

Meanwhile, Italian police were concentrating their hunt on a canal not far from the station at the southern town of Cerignola, where Schepp committed suicide.

Italy’s ANSA news agency said they were acting on the assumption that Schepp threw away the satellite navigator from his car before he killed himself.

If found, it could enable them to retrace his route since he left the Swiss village of St-Sulpice on January 28.