14 DAY TRIAL // Police in France have been searching for nearly a week for a two-year-old boy who was reported missing, but they discovered that the boy didn’t actually exist and the story was just the construct of a fake Facebook account.
Chayson Basinio was reported missing from Auvergne last Friday by his great-aunt, who said the boy had vanished from a supermarket car park and she feared he had been kidnapped. The woman claimed Basinio’s parents had separated and she hadn’t seen them in a long time.
Authorities began a frantic search for the boy, as they thought they were racing against time. A local judge opened a kidnapping inquiry, and divers even searched at a nearby lake in the area, fearing the child may have drowned.
However, it later turned out that neither the boy nor his parents existed. According to the Guardian, the so-called Basinio family only existed in the virtual world of social media. French police discovered the story was invented when they were preparing to tell relatives to expect the worst.
Officers wanted to contact Chayson's family to inform them they couldn't locate him, but were unable to find any trace of the boy's parents in real life.
Detectives discovered a false Facebook account created in the name of Rayane Basinio, which included several photographs of this man and his son, Chayson. But the pictures turned out to be fake, and police says they were taken from a local newspaper to make them seem real.
Public prosecutor Eric Mazaud mentions that the whole story was actually invented by the woman who first reported the crime.
“The inquiry for kidnapping and sequestration has obviously been redirected into one of reporting an imaginary crime or offence,” Mazaud said. “It [the inquiry] was long and complicated but we can now say that the young Chayson has never existed and nor have his father or mother.”
The woman is now in police custody, and if found guilty, she faces up to six months in prison and a €7,500 ($10,300) fine for inventing a crime. Investigators believe the woman’s teenage daughter and her cousin set up the fake Facebook page. Both minors have been questioned in relation to this unusual case.
“We don't know why someone decided to make a false report. We are currently trying to work out a motive. Either that person has a psychological problem, or there were other purposes behind it, such as revenge,” the public prosecutor added.