CHEVALINE, France, (Reuters) – Police investigating a gruesome family murder in the French Alps are looking at several theories, including that the British man shot dead in his car with his wife and another woman was involved in a financial feud with his brother.
As forensics experts performed autopsies on the four victims, who include a local cyclist who was passing at the time of the attack, a team of French investigators landed in Britain.
A state prosecutor confirmed the people killed in the car were a couple from Britain – on a camping holiday in the Annecy region with their two daughters – and an older woman.
The girls, aged seven and four, survived and are under police protection in hospital after the shootings on a remote forest road near the village of Chevaline on Wednesday.
Prosecutor Eric Maillaud identified the dead car driver as Saad al-Hilli, an Iraqi-born Briton. He said Hilli’s four-year-old daughter – who hid for eight hours with the bodies in the car, too scared to move – had confirmed she had been with her parents and sister when the attack took place.
“She said, ‘It’s my father’, she gave his first name, ‘It’s my mother’, she gave her first name, ‘It’s my sister’,” Maillaud told a news conference in the town of Annecy, near Chevaline. The older girl was badly beaten in the attack.
Maillaud cautioned that a tip-off to British authorities that Hilli and his brother were involved in a money dispute was “an interesting line of investigation, but one among many”.
