Moroccan Family’s Vacation Nightmare: Wife Left Behind at Rest Stop, Found 300km Away

An unusual incident at the highway rest area. On their way to Morocco from the Paris region, a sexagenarian of Moroccan origin, his wife and their 22-year-old daughter stopped early at dawn on Saturday, July 5th for prayer. Afterwards, the car continued on its way. However, the matriarch was missing. The family father alerted the gendarmes of the motorcycle brigade of Labouheyre, in the Landes, reports France Bleu. Around 8:30 am on Saturday, the departmental highway safety squadron of the Landes was alerted of a strange disappearance, while all the gendarmes in the area were mobilized for this first weekend of the holiday season, says Captain Octave Cerezo.

The search then began. Tracing the woman’s phone and a payment slip from a gas station in the Deux-Sèvres found in her suitcase were of great help to the gendarmes. They managed to find her trail. The sexagenarian was located 300 kilometers away, in Pamproux in the Deux-Sèvres, where the family had stopped to refuel. She was alone, perhaps distraught, but in good health at the Pamproux highway rest area, on the A10, southwest of Poitiers. "We thought she was dozing off in the back," they painfully justified to the gendarmes.

On the orders of the gendarmes, the missing woman’s husband, who tested negative for alcohol and drug tests, turned around and went to pick up his wife, who had taken refuge in a gendarmerie in the Deux-Sèvres.