The remains of Esther Dingley, a British woman who went missing
while hiking alone in the Pyrenees mountains eight months ago, have been found,
according to an international support group for missing person cases.
اضافة اعلان
The organization,
LBT Global, announced the discovery in a
statement Friday, adding that Dingley’s identity was confirmed through
DNA testing after a single bone had been found close to her last known location.
An investigation remains ongoing, the group said, although it
did not specify which authorities were involved. The organization said that
there was still no sign of equipment or clothing in the immediate area where
the bone was found and that search and rescue teams would continue to scour the
area by land and air.
PGHM Luchon, the French mountain authority in the region, could
not immediately be reached for comment.
Dingley’s partner, Dan Colegate, and her mother said in a joint
statement that the discovery was “devastating beyond words.”
“We have all known for many months that the chance we would get
to hug our beloved Esther again, to feel her warm hand in ours, to see her
beautiful smile and to watch the room light up again whenever she arrived was
tiny, but with this confirmation that small hope has now faded,” they said.
Colegate and Dingley had documented their travels around Europe
for the past six years on a popular blog, drawing attention from fellow
globe-trotters.
At the time of Dingley’s disappearance, she had been on a
monthlong solo trek while Colegate stayed on a farm in Gascony, in southwestern
France.
Dingley was last seen Nov. 22 on Pic de Sauvegarde, a mountain
in the Pyrenees along the border with Spain, according to French authorities.
She had planned to return three days later, Colegate said.
By early December and amid poor weather conditions, authorities
in France had grown pessimistic about the chances of finding Dingley. That
month, Colegate said his partner’s disappearance had “broken” him.
In the months that followed, Colegate pursued his own search
efforts alongside French and Spanish authorities, zigzagging across the
mountainsides surrounding Dingley’s last known location and her known route.
“I’ve walked about 700 miles now and also found no sign of her,”
he said in a statement on Facebook this month.
Writing about his exhaustive search efforts for the BBC,
Colegate said his partner’s vanishing had “defined almost every waking moment
for me for more than seven months now.”
He said that when friends suggested his search was like looking
for a needle in a haystack, he disagreed with the comparison.
“Even if the analogy did work,” he wrote, “my response would be
that you can find a needle in a haystack, if you’re willing to study every
strand, one at a time.”
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