ROME -- Police in southern Italy Saturday found the microchip from the navigational device in the car driven by the father of missing 6-year-old Swiss twins, after weeks of searching the train tracks where the man killed himself, an investigator said.
Teams of police and volunteers had been combing the tracks near Cerignola station in Puglia hoping the chip could be found and yield information about the route Matthias Schepp drove in the days between when he was last seen with daughters Alessia and Livia in late January, and Feb. 3, when his body was found along the tracks.
Scattered pieces of the car's navigational device, minus the chip, had been found shortly after the suicide.
Investigators have said there is no indication the twins ever arrived in Italy with their father, who was apparently distraught over separating from his wife, although French and Swiss police have said the girls could gone anywhere from Switzerland to France to Italy.
Asked if the microchip's discovery could be a big break in the case, Alfredo Fabbrocini, the Foggia police official leading the Italian end of the missing twins' case, was cautious.
"First we have to see if it still works," Fabbrocini told The Associated Press in Rome by telephone. He said the chip was found under a 50-centimeter (20-inch) deep layer of small stones that fill the spaces between railroad ties and track, and about 15 meters (50 feet) from where Schepp's body was found.
"Then we have to see if he (Schepp) had turned on the navigator" in his journey, the police official said. The chip will be brought Monday to the Milan office of its U.S. manufacturer, which will then send it back to the factory in the U.S. for analysis.
Much of the five-week search for the girls has focused on the French island of Corsica, which Schepp visited days before he killed himself in Cerignola. Witnesses claim to have seen the girls board an overnight ferry on Jan. 31 with their father, headed from Marseille, in southern France, to the island.
The girls had been spending the weekend with their father.
In a letter to the girls' mother, Irina Lucidi, found shortly after Schepp killed himself, the father said the girls were resting in peace and that he intended to commit suicide.
Cerignola's train station has been shut down for several hours daily since the body was found so police and around 100 Red Cross and other volunteers could search for the microchip, Fabbrocini said.
The search will resume Sunday for a tape recorder Schepp was known to carry with him, Fabbrocini.
