Terrified tot huddled under murder victim
French police can’t explain why 4-year-old was undetected for eight hours at scene
ANNECY, FRANCE — French authorities struggled Thursday to explain why no one found a 4-year-old child for eight hours at a blood-strewn crime scene as she huddled in a car under the skirt of a corpse — apparently her dead mother or grandmother.
The stunning discovery Thursday of the girl, apparently unharmed, heightened the drama around a mysterious shooting rampage in the French Alps that left four adults dead and a 7-year-old girl hospitalized after being shot and brutally beaten.
A day after a cyclist came across the corpses in a wooded area near the mountain village of Chevaline, investigators said the reason for the killing remains unclear.
Prosecutor Eric Maillaud said investigators were searching for possible perpetrators and studying all possibilities, including a scoresettling attack or simply that the family was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The two sisters were under police care.
“The girl was found totally immobile in fact on the floor of the vehicle, behind the front passenger-side seat, under the legs — under the skirt — of one of the women who were killed, around a large travel bag, totally invisible and silent — which explains why no one saw her before,” Maillaud said.
French authorities took pains to avoid identifying the six people found in and around a BMW at the wooded site. The bodies of a man and two women were in the car, and the body of an unrelated male French cyclist was found on the ground nearby. .
Maillaud said the car was registered to a British man born in Baghdad in 1962. He said the man who had lived in London for a decade and his family had been vacationing in France since August, camping on nearby Lake Annecy. The driver was identi- fied by the Sipa news agency as Saad al Hilli, a resident of a London suburb.
Sky News, citing neighbours in the British town of Claygate, identified his wife as Iqbal, the 7-year-old as Zehab and the 4-year-old as Zeinab. Sky quoted neighbour George Aicolina as saying Saad al Hilli was an engineer who was “very much in love with his two girls.”
Sweden confirmed that one of the victims was Swedish. French authorities found a Swedish passport that appears to be that of an older woman slain in the car.
The French cyclist found near the car was identified as Sylvain Mollier, a man in his 40s from nearby Grenoble who police believe had no relation to the British family. His wife had called police after Mollier failed to return from a ride.
The bodies were found just before 4 p.m. Wednesday by a British cyclist. Although investigators were on the site for hours, the 4-year-old girl was only found after midnight.
One explanation investigators offered was that the man who discovered the bodies and the rescuers he summoned concentrated their attention on the 7-year-old who had severe injuries.
Maillaud said as soon as investigators opened the car door, the younger girl emerged, smiled and reached out her arms. She she had heard cries, but couldn’t describe what had happened.
“She quickly asked where her family was,” he said. “We are hoping for more information from her sister that will help the investigators to move forward.”
French President François Hollande was to speak with British Prime Minister David Cameron later Thursday about the slaying.