Fyra ihjälskjutna i brittisk bil vid fransk sjö (2012-09-05)

I am a psychic and psychological profiler. Marylin has invited me to comment on the murders at Annecy.
I normally draw my conclusions after visiting the scene of the crime (or disappearance). I occasionally work remotely, but almost always with information provided by the police – ie, information that is largely factual and reliable.
Trying to solve cases with only “facts” reported in the media is almost impossible, since much of what is reported is untrue, inaccurate, or incomplete. That is certainly true in this case (which I have been following with professional interest) where there has been a combination of sloppy journalism (fact checking seems to have gone out of fashion), incompetent police work, and deliberately vague and ambiguous police statements. (The French police appear to resent media interest in this case.)
Unless you know the basic facts of what happened, it is virtually impossible to draw any logistical or psychological conclusions.
According to some news reports, the gun used in these attacks was a Skorpion, while others have stated categorically that it was a Luger PO8. Some reports claim that Saad al-Hilli worked on Iraq’s nuclear program, while others reject this claim. Some newspapers cite “experts” as saying that the murders were carried out with “military efficiency”, while others describe the killings as amateurish. And so on. Almost every “fact” one reads about this case is contradicted in the next report.
Much of this might, of course, be deliberate misinformation.
Another problem is that several of the key facts can be interpreted in very different ways. For example, the gun used is one used by Mossad etc. However, it is also an antiquated weapon that was standard issued in various armies all over the world, including the Swiss army. There are literally millions of old Lugers lying around in attics etc.
The fact that the 7 year-old, Zainab, was beaten rather than shot has been interpreted by some newspapers to mean that the attacker or attackers balked at killing a child (even though they did not hesitate to shoot two helpless women), and “spared her life”. Others believe that the only reason Zainab was not shot was because the gunman ran out of bullets.
As others have observed, this case has all the elements of a classical whodunnit or spy thriller. In fact it has an embarrassment of intriguing elements. The victims were Iraqi and Iranian. The father was an expert in satellite surveillance and missile guidance systems. He is rumoured to have worked on Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme before moving to the UK, and he was under MI5 surveillance. The French cyclist is an engineer with specialized knowledge of materials used in nuclear reactors. He worked for the subsidiary of a company that was recently accused of providing Iran with components for its nuclear programme. The person who apparently discovered the scene is an RAF pilot (and, of course, the RAF is one of the main recruiting grounds for top level British Intelligence agents). The weapon is a pistol used by special forces agencies like the SAS, Mossad etc. And the killings took place on a remote car park in the French countryside, near the Swiss border.
These unusual factors present us with a virtual cornucopia of exotic possibilities to consider and explore.
You really couldn’t make this up. If you submitted this scenario to a publisher as the opening chapter of a book, they’d probably send t back to you with a refusal slip and a note advising you that it was too far-fetched.
So what do we know for certain about this case? Well, one thing we know is that the police who are investigating it are merely going through the motions. Either they have known from the outset who carried out these killings, or they are incompetent beyond belief. The reopening of the crime scene to the public after only 48 hours was quite extraordinary. It is simply not possible to properly process a crime scene of this kind in 48 hours.
This crime scene has been treated more like the scene of a routine traffic accident than the site of a multiple murder.
When the police anounced that they were scaling down their investigation after just a week (when they ought to have expanded it), and when they said they believed the reason for the killings was in the UK, I took this to mean that they knew the identity of the killer, who was a local man, and had him under surveillance. As the days have passed without any arrests, however, this assumption appears less and less likely to be correct, and that the police really do regard these murders as an inconvenience rather than a case that needs to be solved. Obviously a brutal attack like this is not good for tourism in the region, and the police may have been under pressure to “make it go away”. But I suspect there is more to it than this.
I agree with several of the observations made by other posters. In particular, that contract killers would be in no doubt as to who their targets were. The killer or killers in this case clearly did not know that there was a child in the car. And if they did know, they did not care.
The significance of this has, I think, been missed. It means that the killer or killers could not have been contracted to kill the entire al-Hilli family. Nor can they have been instructed not to harm the children, since one of the children was shot (this by itself could easily have proved fatal) and severely beaten. It was only by chance that she survived.
This tells us, beyond any doubt, that the professional killers were not contracted to murder the al-Hilli family. Why? Because if they had been hired to kill the entire family, they would have made sure to kill the 4 year-old, Zena (and they would certainly have been aware of her existence). And if they had been instructed to murder only the adults, they would not have shot Zainab.
Therefore they cannot have been professional contract killers.
Incidentally, this thing about killers shooting witnesses because they would be able to identify them is largely unfounded, and therefore possibly a “red herring”. When professional killers want to avoid being identified, they wear a simple disguise – a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses is enough. Or, if they have an escape route, they wear skbalaclavas or ski masks.
Israeli Mossad agents wore elaborate disguises to carry out an “extrajudicial killing” in Dubai because they knew they would be captured on CCTV. But in general professional assassins don’t even bother to disguise themselves because they know that the chances of being identified from a photofit description are remote. And in the case of state sponsored assassins, they know they will be hundreds or thousands of miles away by the time the police start looking for them. Their faces are not going to be found in police mugshot galleries anyway.
The only time killers murder witnesses is when they are already known to those witnesses, or when they live locally and have distinctive physical characteristics that would identify them to the police. A killer with a swastika tattooed on his forehead, for instance, would certainly want to eliminate witnesses. In general, however, professional assassins are not concerned about witnesses.
This case certainly has more of its fair share of unusual features, many of which have been highlighted in the posts above. One of the things that struck me as odd was the fact that no photos appeared in the media of Iqbal al-Hilli, or her mother.
Red top “journalists” are usually very resourceful when it comes to obtaining photos of murder victims. They borrow, steal or buy them from relatives, friends and colleagues of the murdered person, or grab them from socual network profiles, professional directories and so on. But in this case not a single photo of Saad al-Hilli’s wife has been published, as far as I am aware. This is significant to me because when I am working remotely I find it very helpful to have photos of the individuals involved.
I also found it odd that Sylvain Mollier’s wife refused to give the media a photo of her husband. This is her right, of course; but it is still very unusual. Her husband was, after all, being portrayed as an innocent victim who happened to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. Presumably his relatives also declined to give the press photos of him.
Most spouses and relatives have no hesitation about giving a photo of the dead person to the media.

The RAF pilot, William Brett Martin, is lying. I don’t know what he’s lying about, but I do know that he’s lying about something. Or perhaps omitting something in his version of events. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he was involved in the murders, of course.
I found the idea of a bomber pilot who was “panic stricken” by the discovery of dead bodies rather ironic and a little hard to believe. Ironic because this was an Iraqi child, and it was the RAF that carpet-bombed densely populated neighbouthoods of Baghdad in the first weeks of the US-UK invasion of that country, killing and maiming thousands of Iraqi childrern. But I guess when you drop bombs on Iraqi children from 10,000 feet you don’t actually see the injuries you cause.
I note that William Brett Martin’s (originally he was Brett Martin: the “William” was added later) company website, http://www.silverfernsussex.co.uk is “down for maintenance”. This is perhaps understandable; but what is slightly more peculiar is that the archived version of his website has also disappeared.
http://archive.org/web/web.php
In early reports he claimed that he had switched off the engine of the car because he was afraid it would roll over Zainab, who was lying in front of it. In his interview for the BBC, however, he states that he moved Zainab clear of the car, in case it rolled over her. Which is it? If he’d switched off the engine, there was no reason to move her. And if he’d moved her, there was no reason to switch off the engine. It may be a minor detail, but somehow something about this just doesn’t ring true to me.
The business about Brett Martin’s cell phone not having a signal appears to have been comfirmed. The hiker, Philippe Didierjean, also couldn’get a signal, we are told. And yet there are videos and photos taken at the scene of the attacks, in which journalists, policemen etc., are talking on their cell phones.
http://cdn2.wn.com/vp/i/48/7662931244845d.jpg
I have my own ideas about these murders, but they are based on intuition moreso than logic (though of course both have to be consistent to be true), so I will spare you my personal theories. In any event you guys seem to have covered all the angles. Some of the comments here are, I think, very astute.
The police have interviewed Zainab. She knows what happened. Presumably she was able to describe the man or men who did the shooting. He beat her up. She would have told the what they were doing at the car park, how long they’d been there, whether her father was meeting someone, whether there had been any kind of argument or confrontation before the shooting started, whether the gunman was on a motorbike or in a car, and the colour of the car – etc.
So why haven’t they issued a wanted description based on her statement? Again, the usual reason for not making a description public is because the police already know the identity of the perpetrator. The only other possible reasons for not issuing a description are ineptitude and bowing to political pressure.
The police will by now have processed most of the forensic evidence. They should know the order in which the victims were shot. Whether the gun was used in any previous crime. Whether the killer was wearing gloves. Crucially, they would have lifted fingerprints, if any, from the 25 bullets and shells found at the scene. If there were no fingerprints on the bullets, this would strongly indicate that the shootings had been carefully planned. Fingerprints on the bullets would suggest that the murders were not planned.
The police already have this information. They also know whether the gunman touched (and left his fingerprints on) the car. Again, avoidiung leaving fingerprints, or wearing gloves, would point to premeditation. If the killings were the outcome of a road rage incident, for example, or they were carried out by a local gun nut who got into an altercation with Saad al-Hilli and “lost it”, he would be unlikely to have had the presence of mind to put on gloves or avoid touching the car. And the bullets – presumably with his fingerprints on them – would probably have already been in the gun. And if they weren’t, would the gunman think to wear gloves before loading?
If he used three magazine clips, as has been reported (three full clips of 8 bullets, and one bullet in the chamber), did he actually have three ready-loaded magazines with him? And if so, did he take the empty clips away with him? Or did he only have one magazine, which he reloaded twice at the scene? This would take time and an exceptionally cool head.
Incidentally – and in conclusion – one of the most amateurish aspects of these murders was the bludgeoning of Zainab. Most trained gunmen also have an at least rudimentary knowledge of other killing techniques. These include using a knife to cut the victim’s throat, breaking the victim’s neck, and strangulation. Bashing someone over the head is not an effective way to kill someone (as this case proves), nor is it a method that any trained, experienced killer would consider using. A properly trained assassin could have killed Zainab al-Hilli in less than two seconds. Attempting to club someome to death strikes me as something that someone might do who was used to killing animals – a farmer, perhaps, or a hunter.
By the way, there is another angle to these murders that everyone seems to have completely overlooked. But I think I should probably leave that for another post…