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Latest update: 07/09/2012
- France - murder - UK
UK and French police join forces in Alps killing inquiry
Surrey police are helping French authorities investigating the brutal murder of four people in eastern France, after a passport found at the scene showed that at least one of the victims was a British citizen. Police are still searching for a motive.
Police in the UK are helping French authorities investigating the brutal shooting deaths of four people in eastern France after it emerged the driver was a UK citizen.
Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud on Thursday identified the driver of the BMW hatchback as Saad al-Hilli, 50, from Claygate, Surrey.
Surrey police have confirmed that they are liaising with the Foreign Office as the investigation in the Haute-Savoie administrative region, near the Swiss border, gathered pace.
French President François Hollande vowed that "everything will be done" to find those responsible for the attack. Speaking at a press conference in London on Thursday, he said France stood "in solidarity" with Britain.
Maillaud told a press conference in Annecy that al-Hilli was of Iraqi origin and had been living in England “since at least 2002”.
He told told reporters that it was still unclear if al-Hilli and the woman were the parents of the two girls, one of whom was critically injured, who were found at the scene of the crime.
“The BMW’s registration was traced to the owner, and with this information we were able to get a passport number,” Maillaud said. This passport number corresponds with one that was given to a nearby camp site.
An older woman who was also shot dead held two passports – one Iraqi and the other Swedish – while no documents had been found for the younger woman or for the two children, one of whom was in hospital Thursday recovering from a gunshot wound to the shoulder.
The other child was found by the forensics investigators eight hours after the crime had been reported by a British cyclist, a former member of the Royal Air Force on holiday in the area.
Maillaud said that the four-year-old girl had hidden under the legs of the older woman and told police that “there was noise and that she was scared”.
Another cyclist, a French national named as Sylvain Mollier, was found gunned down near the scene of the crime.
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Alps Murders
These were murders, not "killings"...big deal! This happens every night in Chicago! You people make it out to be some kind of international incident just to sell newspapers!
Murder of Al-Hilli and family.
He worked for Surrey Satellite, and others, latterly through his own small company. He had apparently been living mostly in the UK since the seventies, when his family's business fell out of favour with Saddam Hussain.
The little girls are his, and the young woman is their mother and his wife. The older one attends Claygate Primary School and the younger one was due to join the reception class there this week.
Resident in Claygate for at least 21 years, which is as far back as his newsagent's records go. Not a bad word being said about him and quite obviously well-liked and respected.
The killing, however, shows signs of being what Mossad and the Hasbara would call a "targeted killing".
The bullets were not actually sprayed about: they were carefully placed: shots to windows to prepare the way for shots to head: no shots wasted on metal.
The passing cyclist was also hit in the middle of the head, which would be beyond the skill range of most underworld contract killers. Someone trained on a government budget, somewhere, with no other demands on their time other than honing their skills and occasionally employing them.
The youngest girl survived, not because the killer spared her (see the Daily Mail's slightly jarring headline), but because he, like the police, obviously didn't know she was there. The older daughter was not "spared": she was apparently shot three times and at one point the French authorities believed her to be dead. The killer made every effort to kill her as she ran and must have thought he succeeded.
This is not the first time an act of unexplained violence has deprived the United Kingdom of a valuable expert, and, by all accounts, a doting father.
Neo-Nazis, probably.
Neo-Nazis, probably.