“It might be a very old trace too, so everybody is being very cautious about the find”, the source added.

Meanwhile, police confirmed that Emile’s parents home - in Bouilladisse - was searched on Monday, with one judicial source stating that “gendarmes were looking into the family’s background.”

The blood detected on the front of a car in Le Vernet, the French Alpine village where two-year-old Emile went missing on Saturday, was “not human blood but animal blood.”

“After analysis, it was not human blood but animal blood”, prosecutor Rémy Avon told La Provence.

The investigation into the disappearance of two-year-old Emile will enter a second phase from Thursday, police have said.

Investigators will conduct an in-depth analysis of the “numerous elements” collected over the previous days, as prosecutor Rémy Avon noted that “the parents were not present at the time of the disappearance on Saturday.”

Émile, aged two-and-a-half, was playing in the garden of his grandparent’s house when he vanished on Saturday afternoon. A desperate hunt –involving helicopters, drones, and sniffer dogs – has been taking place to try and find the missing toddler.

A dedicated hotline number has received over 1,200 phone calls, but police still have “no clue” about Émile’s whereabouts as fears for his safety intensify on the fifth day since he went missing.

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French police searching for a two-year-old boy who went missing from his grandparents’ garden in the French Alps on Saturday said on Tuesday they had no clues as to what could have happened to him.

The boy, Emile, was last seen walking down the street of his grandparents’ house - located in a remote mountain outpost with only two dozen inhabitants - by two witnesses on Saturday afternoon, a prosecutor said.

Police and gendarmes have entered every building of the settlement. Some 500 volunteers have also helped with the search, looking for Emile in the forests and fields that surround the village, the local prefect’s office said on Twitter.

“At this point, we don’t have any clues allowing us to follow any particular theory (on his whereabouts)”, the local public prosecutor told FranceInfo radio.

The search operations for two-year-old Emile are expected to end today, Rémy Avon, told Agence France-Presse, as he announced a new direction for the investigation.

Two-year-old Emile went missing in Le Vernet, a small mountain village in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department and the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in southeastern France.

It has a population of approximately 100.

As the search continues for two-year-old Emile, a local mayor has reflected on the decades-old case of a 3-year-old that went missing in Ganagobie, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in 1989.

“It reminds us of a lot of things. I sent a little message of support to the mayor of Vernet, François Balique”, Ganagobie mayor Sylvie Belmonte told La Provence, referencing the disappearance of 3-year-old Yannis Moré in May 1989.

“I was town clerk and I took part in the search to try to find little Yannis”, he added.

Yannis had disappeared whilst playing with his three brothers, prompting a search of one hundred gendarmes, soldiers, firefighters and volunteers. However, there were no witnesses, no clues and no suspect.

“We had been settled in Ganagobie for 18 months... I saw them having fun from the window”, Yannis’s mother, Pascaline Moré, told La Provence in 2016. “We give ourselves hope”, she added.

The search operations for two-year-old Emile are expected to end today, Rémy Avon, told Agence France-Presse, as he announced a new direction for the investigation.

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A desperate search is underway for a toddler who vanished from a garden while on holiday with his grandparents in the south of France.

Two-year-old Emile, whose surname is unknown, was playing in the garden of a property in Le Vernet in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence on Saturday when he went missing.

His family was preparing to go out for the day when they noticed Emile had vanished, François Balique, the mayor of Le Vernet, told local media.

“He took advantage of this fleeting moment [of inattention] to leave,” he said of the boy’s disappearance.

“His grandparents realised he was no longer there when they went to put him in the car.”

Remy Anon, the prosecutor of the Republic of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in France, told reporters last evening that “we are working on all the hypotheses”.

He added: “Medically we are told that beyond a period of 48 hours, given the young age of the child, given his constitution and considering that a human who would be deprived of food and water by the current high heat, the vital prognosis is very very engaged.”