A seven-year-old British boy has been killed after accidentally skiing off-piste in the French Alpine resort of Flaine.
Mountain rescue teams believe that the child, who was skiing with his mother and siblings at an altitude of 1,500 metres, fell into a ravine after apparently taking a wrong turn off the marked slope.
The boy had reportedly asked his mother to allow him to ski down the last part of the piste on his own as they returned to the ski station on Friday afternoon. After emergency teams alerted by the child’s family had failed to find him, a rescue helicopter discovered his body at the foot of a steep rocky escarpment.
Rescuers suggested he may have got lost. “He went over a rocky outcrop, then fell between 50 and 100 metres,” a mountain rescue officer told the local newspaper, the Dauphiné Liberé. A fire officer added: “He died instantly, most probably around two hours before we found him.”
An investigation has been opened to establish the exact circumstances of the accident. Police chief Patrick Poirot, head of the mountain rescue division in nearby Annecy, said: “Specialists are at the scene to try to determine exactly what happened and understand every element that led to this tragedy.
“We think that, after losing his parents, the little boy didn’t know where to go and skied in the wrong direction. He left the marked ski slope and probably skied to the top of a cliff. He then stopped, removed his skis, walked a little way, then fell.”
