Hungary's Chief Prosecutor to treat Bretnacher case as possible kidnapping

Hungary's Chief Prosecutor has launched an investigation on the assumption that Ophelie Bretnacher, reported missing on December 4 last year in Budapest, might have been kidnapped, the prosecutor's office confirmed on Friday.

The decision, made on Thursday, came in the wake of a complaint by the missing student's parents against Hungarian authorities which had refused to conduct a criminal investigation, Zoltan Borbely, spokesman for the chief prosecutor, said.

The spokesman added, however, that although it was not a proven fact that the missing person had been kidnapped, the possibility could not be excluded either.

Bretnacher, a visiting student at Budapest's Corvinus University of Economics, went missing in the early hours of December 4, after leaving a night club in central Budapest. The last recordings of surveillance cameras showed her on Roosevelt Square at the Pest side of Chain Bridge. Her bag containing her personal identification papers and mobile phone was found on the bridge a couple of hours later by two Italian students.

A seven-member Hungarian police team set up to investigate the case questioned about 40 people but found no significant clues. Hungarian Danube river police and the French Rhine River Police Force had searched the riverbed with a special, high-performance sonar device but found no corpse.

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