When three men turned up in the village of Poulières near France’s border with Switzerland last Tuesday, there was no reason to doubt they were who they said they were: child welfare officials.
Mia, the eight-year-old girl they were there to see, had been taken from her mother in January and placed in the care of her maternal grandmother, who assumed the men who knocked on her door were simply checking up on the child’s well-being. They even produced convincing identity documents to prove who they were.
But they weren’t child welfare officials. They were kidnappers who were part of an online group of QAnon survivalists and were planning other child abductions and discussing blowing up vaccinations clinics.