Are the Swiss police doing enough?
Monday December 28, 2009 - Email this article to a friend

He vanished after walking a family friend back to her hotel in the early hours of the morning after an evening out in the Swiss resort. 

He was last seen alive at 2am.

He then had a short walk of about 200m back to his hotel, The Hotel Eiger, where he was due to spend Christmas with his family.

The family has been holidaying in the resort for the past 15 years and is well known. They say the ordeal is a "nightmare" for them.

He never arrived back and a signal has been traced from his mobile phone at 5am to a place about a 30-minute walk from the centre of the Swiss ski resort.

Should have been a perfect ChristmasHowever it is not certain the location of the phone signal is accurate due to the mountainous geography of the area that can sometimes misplace the exact location of a mobile phone.

Wengen is perched high above a valley with no connection to the outside world once the railway stops at night.  There is no car access, so it would be impossible for him to leave the resort, either voluntarily or forcibly, by vehicle.

There is though a little known and little used path down to the valley which would have been dangerous to walk along during the night.

He had apparently not been drinking heavily and it is totally out of character for him simply to disappear.  His girlfriend was planning to join him for New Year and he was due to start a new job at the beginning of January.

Now family friends have called on police to step up their efforts to find him.

The police have carried out searches including the use of infra-red scanners, dogs and helicopters but to no avail.  The Swiss army has also been helping out.

Family and friends have indicated that they feel more could be done.

Here on PlanetSKI we reported on the worries that the authorities were perhaps not doing enough a few days ago, after we were contacted by a PlanetSKI reader in the resort.

"There is much anxiety amongst visitors that this case is being treated by local police as a 'missing person' case, and that the possibility of something more sinister is not being considered," says the PlanetSKI reader who wishes to remain nameless.

"Many people are voicing their opinion that there now seems to be a distinct lack of police involvement, with no house-to-house searches being conducted, and no interviews of pertinent people being carried out. For example, people in the apartment block where Myles was last seen, and who might potentially have heard or seen something, have not been approached." 

The police have not carried out any house-to-house searches because they say there is no evidence of foul play and it could cause problems with local Swiss privacy laws.

The family has put up posters in town and have been carrying out their own searches with friends and family and issuing descriptions of him.

They have been asking people to check their barns, cellars or other buildings that are not normally used.

The family, though now calling for more action, has also gone out of their way to praise and encourage the police efforts in several interviews with the media.

Three years ago another person disappeared from Wengen without trace. Daniel Battista vanished in 2006 after taking mescaline.  There has been no sign of him since.  Neither the police nor the family are linking the two disappearances.

Several people also die each winter after drinking too much in the mountains during a night out. The Foreign Office has launched a campaign this wjnter to point out the dangers, as we reported here on PlanetSKI.

There is no indication that Myles Robinson was drunk at the time of his disappearance and at the moment the case remains a complete mystery.

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