The holes in the red soil and the bones that have been dug up lead to one question: has journalist Guy-Andre Kieffer, who vanished in Ivory Coast in April 2004, been found?

"Here, this is it," said Dougnon Ade, a peasant farmer from the village of Yaokro, which lies beside a tarred road between the towns of Saioua and Issia, in the heart of the west African country's cocoa-growing region, about 360 kilometres (225 miles) from the commercial capital Abidjan.

The Franco-Canadian Kieffer, a specialist in the cocoa industry who was writing about corruption, was last seen in a parking lot in Abidjan on April 16, 2004.

The lack of success in the subsequent inquiry worsened thorny relations between France and Ivory Coast's former regime led by Laurent Gbagbo, who today stands accused of crimes against humanity and is being held by the International Criminal Court.

The probe only took off again recently, after Gbagbo was ousted by President Alassane Ouattara and a French examining magistrate was sent back to Ivory Coast.

At Yaokro two holes have been freshly dug in the ground, right by a dank stream that is crossed by a bridge. The way to the site is through brush and high grass, in suffocating heat.

"The head was there," towards the bridge, "and the feet here," by the track, the robust Ade, in his 60s, told AFP, pointing to the holes. He took part in the exhumation of the remains on Friday.

The bones were dug up on the instructions of French magistrate Patrick Ramael. The results of DNA tests, to be carried out in France, will be known on Tuesday or Wednesday, according to Kieffer's wife, Osange Silou-Kieffer.

The youths who accompanied Dougnon Ade were surprised by the curiosity over the long-anonymous body. "The corpse has been there for some time and all of a sudden, everybody is interested in it," one of them said.

But nobody can say precisely how long the body has lain in this remote and verdant corner of the west African country.

"At least five years," according to the head of the village, Ernest Allou Kouame, in his 50s, installed in the courtyard of his house where his wives and children were busy. But nobody knows how the body first came to be in Yaokro.

Konan N'Goran, another farmer, said that he discovered it. "It was during the dry season, I went out to the fields. On my way back, I came down by the water."

He added that on the site he found "three candles and a sharp machete," then "a body lying in the water".

"He was practically naked, I don't know whether it was his clothes taken and attached to his neck. That was a Saturday."

N'Goran and some other villagers contended that the man was black. But Dougnon Ade, who helped dig him up, was categorical.

"It was a white man" and "tall," he said, adding that "on his body, they put something, (like) varnish or paint."

Told of the discovery, Yaokro's chief went to the paramilitary police at Saioua.

"Two gendarmerie agents and a doctor came to investigate. They asked me to tip off nearby villages so that they could come and see the body. Nobody recognised him and the gendarmes asked me to bury him. That's how it happened," Kouame said.

Soldiers posted near Yaokro who disapprove of talk between villagers and journalists arrived at the scene on Sunday afternoon on several pick-up trucks and sealed off the area between the bridge and the shore.

Former president Gbagbo and his wife Simone, arrested on April 11 at the end of a political crisis that claimed at least 300 lives, are both suspects in Kieffer's disappearance.

When last seen, the journalist was waiting to see Simone Gbagbo's brother-in-law Michel Legre.