Olympic Driver and Former Political Candidate Missing in France, Authorities Investigate

Mohamed El Aiyate, 57, has been missing since Friday, August 23. The man was a driver during the Paris 2024 Olympics where he escorted celebrities like Zinédine Zidane, Serena Williams and Prince Faisal bin al-Hussein of Jordan. The Beauvais public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into a worrying disappearance. For the moment, the investigations conducted by the Auneuil gendarmerie brigade to find him have yielded nothing, reports Le Parisien.

The missing person is a very active man. In addition to being a professional taxi and VTC driver, he is also a political figure. Mohamed El Aiyate was a candidate (Ecology in the Center) in the 2024 European elections and in the 2022 and 2024 legislative elections in the second constituency of the Oise, informs France 3. The fifty-year-old is also an activist in associations in the Oise where he has opened a sports hall and a "solidarity garage".

Without news of him for several days, his family alerted the police to his disappearance. The relatives of Mohamed found his house located in Goincourt, open, with inside "his identity papers, his mobile phone and his car", as well as a handwritten letter written by the missing person. "His diabetes and the malaise expressed by Mohamed El Aiyate before his departure are elements of concern that point to a continuation of the search," said Frédéric Trinh, the Beauvais public prosecutor.

The investigation is ongoing. At the current stage, the hypothesis of a voluntary disappearance "seems the most likely", a magistrate confided to TF1, adding that since the weekend, "the investigators have successively deployed personnel, a helicopter, divers, thermal detection means and then a St. Hubert dog to try to find the missing person".