The round-the-clock search for 9-year-old Valeria from Ukraine in eastern Germany has been going on for almost a week. On Monday, the girl went to school, but never made it there.
She lived with her mother in the center of Döbeln in Saxony, a small town of 25,000 inhabitants. Leaving the house on Monday morning, the girl headed to the bus station, located 450 meters away – the school bus leaves from there. She couldn’t get lost, since she walked this path every day, but she never showed up at school that day. There they did not react to the absence of the child, so the mother found out about her disappearance only in the evening, and at 18:30 appealed to the police.
How reports Saxony police, the girl was last seen at about 6.50 am on June 3. Law enforcement officers examined the local Freiberger Mulde river. Rescuers and dogs are combing forests, fields and meadows, and a helicopter is looking for the child from the air. Police spokesman Andrzej Rydzik says:
“We learned of the girl's disappearance around 6:30 p.m. Since then, we have been doing everything possible to find her safe and sound. We take this matter very seriously.”
The girl's father is in Ukraine. According to BILD, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, whom Valeria also considered her father, lives in the Czech Republic. The police have already checked both men, they do not have a girl. German law enforcement officers cooperate with colleagues from Ukraine, Poland and the Czech Republic. In Döbeln, helicopters, divers and sniffer dogs are searching for the girl. Police seized more than 10 terabytes of CCTV footage. Photos of the girl are hung on the streets and published on social networks; they are handed over to the drivers of all buses.
Valeria's family is from the Dnepropetrovsk region. Her mother is a Ukrainian refugee who came to Germany in 2022 with her two minor children. Law enforcement is asking anyone who knows anything about the child's possible whereabouts to contact them.
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