A British man and a woman killed on the outskirts of a forest in the Alps were found inside a locked car with the engine still running and bullets to the middle of the head, say French prosecutors.
The bodies of the man, named locally as Saad al-Hilli, 50, an engineer and businessman from Surrey, and the woman, who has not been named, were found by a British ex-RAF officer who had been cycling along the road above Lake Annecy in the Haute-Savoie region of south west France on Wednesday.
He was overtaken on the road by another cyclist, French investigators said. He continued travelling, only to stumble upon a seriously injured young girl who was “advancing towards” a BMW family estate car which still had the engine running but was riddled with bullets.
At that point, the French official said, he saw the cyclist who had overtaken him earlier lying dead on the ground. As he walked towards the car, he saw a man dead at the wheel, and the bodies of another two women in the back seat.
The cyclist called rescuers, and the young girl, aged seven, was taken to hospital for emergency surgery, but it was not until some eight hours later that another four-year-old girl was discovered curled up, hiding beneath the legs of one of the women, after fellow campers at a campsite they had been staying at told officers the family had two children.
Both girls are now under protection, with the older child fighting for her life after she was put into an induced coma, having sustained severe head fractures and a bullet to her shoulder.
“We found this little [four-year-old] girl,” the French public prosecutor, Eric Maillaud, said. “She was curled up under the legs of the dead woman. She was four years old, and small. She is going through a very profound trauma.”
But he added that she is not yet fully aware of what happened, and was observed by a psychiatric nurse all night, after she was found “terrorised, motionless, in the midst of the bodies…She has no idea of the magnitude.”
Speaking to Channel 4 News in Claygate, neighbour Jack Saltman said “it’s beyond belief”. He described how the dead man, an engineer, had helped repair his lawnmower and how the wife, who had been a dentist in Iraq, was retraining to gain UK qualifications to practise as a dentist here.
Describing how he would chat over the garden fence to the two daughters, Mr Saltman said “They were just very nice people”, adding that he couldn’t believe he would never see them again. Mr Saltman said that he had passed some information to the UK police which might be relevant to the inquiry, but declined to elaborate further in case he said something libellous.
The French cyclist who was killed was today named as Sylvain Mollier, 45. His wife told investigators that he had gone out for a ride, and was thinking of taking a new route.
French investigators said that it was too early to dicsuss any potential motives for the murders and refused to confirm reports that the man killed was Mr al-Hilli.
However they revealed that he and the women had arrived in the region on September 3, had planned to stay for two weeks or less. He was born in Iraq and was a naturalised British citizen who had been living in the UK since 2002, Mr Maillaud added.
They added that a passport found for the older woman killed was Swedish, and that she appeared to have dual Swedish-Iraqi citizenship.
Mr al-Hilli and his family had been holidaying in a caravan at the Le Solitaire du Lac campsite in nearby Saint-Jorioz.
Mr Maillaud described the situation as “well beyond television fictions”. The red BMW family estate car, which was registered in the UK to Mr al-Hilli, was discovered surrounded by 15 spent bullet cartridges in a car park near footpaths in an area used for picnics, although investigators said that ballistics investigations are “far from finished”.
French prosecutors also praised the British cyclist, a man with a second home in the region, who stumbled upon the scene.
“He must be congratulated for making the girl lie on the ground [in the recovery position]”, Mr Maillaud said.