Over two weeks have passed since an 11-year-old boy in Kyoto Prefecture went missing and despite an ongoing police investigation, little has surfaced to point to his whereabouts.
Yuki Adachi went missing on the morning of March 23 after his father dropped him off at his elementary school in the rural city of Nantan.?
His father had driven him to the school at 8 a.m. for him to attend a graduation ceremony. However, he was not there when teachers took attendance at around 8:30 a.m.
There was no notice from Adachi＊s parents about his absence, but because there was an absence form submitted for the next day, the school thought his parents might have gotten the date wrong and did not immediately contact his family about his absence, according to reports in the Asahi Shimbun.?
Around three hours later 〞 at 11:50 a.m. 〞 the school informed the boy＊s parents about his absence and his father filed a police report around noon.?
A key question is how no one saw Adachi at the school premises after he was dropped off by his father despite the stream of people attending the graduation ceremony, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. None of the security cameras at the school caught sight of the boy either.?
The only significant lead in the case came when a relative who took part in search efforts found the boy＊s yellow backpack in a mountainous area around 3 kilometers northwest of the school on March 29, six days after his disappearance.
According to media reports, the search party had combed the area multiple times in prior days but did not find anything.
Hiroki Nonaka, the head of the Nantan City Fire Department, said that he has mixed feelings about the backpack＊s discovery, including ※shock and a slight feeling that something is off,§ given that the area had been thoroughly searched.?
There has been no record of Adachi using public transportation on the day of his disappearance.
Some 700 people have participated in the search over the past two weeks. A pond near where the backpack was found was also searched, but no additional clues have been uncovered.?
As of Friday morning, police had received approximately 320 tips, though none of them have been particularly useful, according to NHK reports.?
On Friday, a 50-member search party continued to scour the city, including the mountain between the school and the boy＊s house.?
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