Ben Alder body to be exhumed

The examination will take place in the village in North Burgundy where Emmanuel was buried in November last year after Scottish police finally identified his decomposed remains. This was 13 months after the Caillet family first came forward to claim him as their son, missing after crossing the Channel for a British holiday in August 1995.

Clearly bitter over their experiences with Scottish officialdom, and highly sceptical of the Aviemore police theory that Emmanuel's death on Ben Alder was the result of suicide, the Caillets have been successful in prompting the French authorities to open their own inquiry into the possibility of murder.

Mr Pierre Caillet, the merchant banker who has travelled 10 times to Britain to search for his son and then seek justice after Emmanuel was finally identified, has already appeared before a Judge D'Instruction (a cross between a Scottish procurator-fiscal and an English magistrate) in Nanterre, west of Paris, to present evidence.

The case is being taken up by Judge Jean Michel Gentil of the Nanterre Prefecture. He has persuaded the Caillets to authorise exhumation to assist the inquiry. This followed the failure of legal representatives of the Caillet

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family to obtain a copy of police reports or the post-mortem report on their son from Inverness.

The refusal came from former Inverness procurator-fiscal Graham Buchanan, who has subsequently moved on to become a sheriff. He met Mr Pierre Caillet in Inverness in December and promised to keep inquiries open after listening to a case made into the possibility of a murder.

Since then, the Caillet family have become frustrated by a conspicuous lack of progress, urgency or courtesy. Mr Buchanan moved on without the family being informed. They learned by phone that he was no longer fiscal. A ballistics report has been delayed and excuses have been offered over the expert being on holiday. The last straw appears to have been the failure of the Inverness fiscal's office to respond to new evidence presented by Mr Caillet in a letter to Mr Buchanan.

He sent details, previously undisclosed, that an almost identical gun to the weapon found by the body of Emmanuel was left behind at his apartment outside Paris. It is another replica black powder revolver made by the same Italian manufacturers of Elli Pietta. Unlike the Ben Alder gun, the Paris gun has its serial number clearly visible, is a lower .36 calibre (compared to .44) and has been traced as being bought by Emmanuel from a Marseille gun stockist in June 1994, more than a year before he went missing.

One theory, contesting the ''suicide'' scenario, is that the Ben Alder gun was left beside the body to pass as Emmanuel's gun by someone who did not know the original had been left behind in his apartment near Paris. Nothing connects Emmanuel with the purchase of the gun found by his body.

This evidence is now being put before the French inquest. It is expected Scottish inquiries will continue for at least the next three months before a report is submitted to the Crown Office. A decision will then be made whether to close the case as a suicide, open a new inquiry which could lead to criminal proceedings for murder or open a fatal accident inquiry.

Emmanuel's mother, Mrs Anita Caillet, said: ''We have not been kept informed about anything.

''Mr Buchanan leaving his job was very bad for us. We should have been informed about that as a matter of courtesy. I think the Scottish authorities have been hard on us as parents. If they had sent us police reports and the post-mortem report, perhaps we would know things for sure and we could have accepted their conclusions. Now it is difficult for us to accept anything we are told by them about our dead son.''