Police have arrested the father of a nine-year-old girl who was found dead hours after he claimed his daughter had been abducted.
Melina Frattolin was reported missing on Saturday after her father Luciano Frattolin told New York State Police (NYSP) he thought his daughter had been kidnapped by someone in a white van.
But records now show that Frattolin is being held in Essex County Jail in upstate New York. A mugshot of the 45-year-old coffee entrepreneur has been released.
It is unclear if any charges have been filed, with police set to provide a further update Monday morning. Frattolin is expected to be arraigned at 10.30am ET.
The distressing development comes after police issued a heartbreaking update that the little girl had been found dead in the town of Ticonderoga on Sunday.
NYSP had issued an ‘amber alert’ on Saturday as a desperate search was launched for Melina, with cops saying at the time that she was believed to be in imminent danger.
Tragically, the girl’s body was found yesterday after extensive searches, with investigators saying there was no indication that she was abducted and that there was ‘no threat to the public’.
Cops said that ‘as the case progressed, law enforcement identified inconsistencies in the father’s account of events and the timeline he provided.’
She was located in Ticonderoga, New York, around 45 miles south of where her father said she had last been seen.
Lake George, the spot where he said he last saw her, is a small waterside town in the Adirondack region of upstate New York around 60 miles north of Albany.
Frattolin was described as five feet tall, weighing 100 pounds and being of Indian descent with brown hair and brown eyes.
Police said that both she and her father are Canadian residents.
Frattolin is the founder of an organic coffee brand called Gambella, according to the product’s website.
‘Luciano Frattolin is an experienced entrepreneur with a proven track record of building diverse, high-performance businesses,’ the website reads.
‘With a background in the humanities and social sciences, his formal education, together with his pragmatic understanding about the complexities of life, motivates him to maintain an understanding of the world grounded in a distinct cross-cultural ethos.
‘The son of an Ethiopian mother and an Italian father, Luciano was born in the small, remote village of Gambella.
‘With a childhood spent running between rows of crimson coffee buds on the Ethiopian family plantation, and the neoclassical architecture of his father’s Milano, his vision of the world and his pursuits within, reflect these hyphenated cultures.’