A mute six-year-old boy who went missing from his home in April has been found dead less than two miles away. Arian Arnold, who had autism and was nonverbal, wandered away from the property in Elm, Lower Saxony State, Germany, while his parents were distracted.
CCTV footage from the day he disappeared, April 22, showed him walking the streets close to his home, wearing a distinctive orange shirt and seemingly lost. A huge search involving police and 1,200 volunteers using sniffer dogs, drones, boats, divers, sonar, and even a military Tornado jet failed to find him.
But on Monday, a farmhand came across his remains in a field in Estorf, just a 20-minute walk from Arian’s home. The area had been searched by police several times.
Speaking to local media, farmer Jan Schlesselmann, 54, said his son had initially spotted something colourful next to ‘a swampy hole filled with water’ when he mowed the field but ‘didn’t pay any further attention to it’. However, the farmhand later noticed it was a body and alerted his employer.
Mr Schlesselmann said: ‘So I drove over there. My employee was scared sh*tless. And I knew straight away what it could be. ‘It’s about two kilometres in a straight line from Arian’s hometown to where the body was found.’ After calling the police, he led them to the body, which is now undergoing an autopsy to establish how he died.