Diary Sow case: « She’s alive, she’s fine », confides one of her relatives

An intimate account by Diary Sow, under cover of anonymity, confirms the hypothesis of the voluntary disappearance and gives clues to understand the gesture of the Senegalese student from the Louis-le-Grand high school.

« Diary is alive and well. We must leave her alone, we must stop talking about her. Above all, we must give her time to make her choices and come back if she wants to. One thing is sure, she will explain herself one day or another, tomorrow, in a month or a year. In a few words confided this Tuesday to Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France, one of the people closest to Diary Sow dispels, at least in part and under cover of anonymity, a mystery that has persisted since January 4, the day the student from the Louis-le-Grand high school disappeared in Paris.

According to this intimate, the disappearance project was conceived at least a few days or even weeks beforehand. « Perhaps it goes back even further… », she whispers to us. The academic pressure that reigns in the second year of the preparatory class for the Grandes Ecoles of Engineering would be foreign to it. As for the hypothesis of a passionate escapade, envisaged in this type of disappearance, it doesn’t seem to have any more substance.

By leaving his student residence on the Boulevard du Port-Royal (Paris XIIIth) overnight, Diary Sow, a 20-year-old Senegalese, would only have wanted to take her life in hand again and to move away from the red carpet that seemed to be taking shape beneath her feet in a gesture where the romantic dimension cannot be excluded.
A link with the brutal death of her father?

Labelled « Senegal’s best student » in 2018 and 2019 at the end of the general competition and awarded by the President of the Republic Macky Sall himself, she was promised a destiny as a high-level scientist who would sooner or later take on responsibilities in her home country. « No thanks or else when I decide to, » Diary Sow seems to answer with monstrous nerve.

Impossible, still according to one of the members of his first circle, not to also link his radical desire to disappear with the brutal death of his father last April. A pastry chef in the village of Malicounda, a hundred kilometres south of Dakar, he was « his confidant », « his accomplice », « his best friend ». But perhaps the essential is written in black and white in his first novel entitled « Sous le visage d’un ange » (Under the Face of an Angel) and published in 2019 in Senegal. In any case, it is in this direction that invites us to look at Diary Sow’s inner self.

Its main character, Allyn, a sublime young woman with a thwarted destiny, disappears twice in the course of the 317 pages of the work. She makes him say this. « I want to trample on all the taboos, go off the beaten track, refuse all the rules that have been agreed upon so that nothing ever moves. I want to live without any constraint. After having experienced only the regrettable side of life, the time has come for me to enjoy it. Now it’s my turn. No matter what sacrifices it involves. « A few lines further on, an existential doubt springs up: « What good is a life without madness if a gust of wind can turn everything upside down? »
But where is it today?

In this « madness », Diary Sow seems to have taken no one on board. According to our information, she left Paris alone after getting rid of her phone. Having become difficult to trace, she then gave a sign of life to one of her contacts, just enough to spread reassuring news to a very small circle of people.

But where is she now? In France, Belgium or another country in the Schengen area? No one knows, neither her friends nor the investigators of the criminal investigation department who have been trying to trace her since 7 January, the day an investigation into a disturbing disappearance was opened. All we know is that she seems to be alive and not in the grip, » says a police source. But we won’t have confirmation until we see her or speak to her directly.