MARSEILLE: French tourists believed missing after their abandoned canoe was discovered at a popular holiday spot, sparking a massive manhunt, were safe at home all along, legal and police sources said yesterday.
The discovery of an empty canoe floating in the Lac de Sainte-Croix in the heart of Provence triggered fears for a couple and two children believed to have rented it on Thursday.
About 40 rescuers, backed up by a helicopter, divers and sniffer dogs, had been scouring the picturesque emerald lake and its surrounds ever since, in a rescue operation closely followed by local media.
However, yesterday the occupants of the canoe — in fact two couples and no children — came forward after a friend of one of the “missing” couples alerted police.
The prosecutor for the commune of Draguignan, Danielle Drouy-Ayral, said gendarmes questioned one of the women, who “admitted it was her and her friends who abandoned the canoe after having navigation troubles and getting into an argument.”
Gendarme Captain Frederic Del Aguila said that “in a panic” the group had taken the oars and life jackets with them as they left the canoe and had returned home.
He welcomed the “happy outcome” of the affair.
Turkmen president quits as party leader
ASHGABAT: Turkmenistan’s president said yesterday he was stepping down as leader of the ruling party to promote a multi-party system in the isolated former Soviet state, a government source said.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told a party conference he was resigning as leader of the ruling Democratic Party he has led since 2006, the source said on condition of anonymity. “The president of a country should not be a member of any party, so as not to create advantages for his party in multi-party conditions,” the source quoted the president as saying at the conference.
Berdymukhamedov took power in 2006 after the death of his father, eccentric dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, who erected a golden rotating statue of himself as part of a bizarre personality cult.
Agencies
