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

Just in case the foregoing link to the Sunday Times ceases to work, I am going to quote some key excerpts from “The little orphans of Annecy”, as this really is fresh information:

He (SAH) had set up Google Latitude on his Android phone, wanting and encouraging his friends to track him on his travels. I don’t suppose he ever imagined they would be tracking him right up until his death, but that is exactly what at least one of his closest friends did — he does not want to be identified.

The friend became alarmed when he realised their position had not changed for some hours. He sensed something was wrong, tried and failed to reach Saad by phone and then went round to the family home in Claygate — that supposed million-pound mansion in the Surrey commuter belt. The friend arrived just ahead of a crew from Sky News, and the terrible news of the Alpine tragedy that had just been discovered.

Of the family group, only four-year-old Zeena and her elder sister Zainab, 7, had survived. Saad al-Hilli, 50, his wife, Ikbal, 47, and her mother, Suhaila, 74, were trapped in the car, all shot and killed in their seats. The two women still had their seatbelts on, and so went safely to their deaths. Inside the car, Zeena was hiding beneath her mother and grandmother’s clothes. She had been lying there for at least eight hours.

Outside, a French cyclist, Sylvain Mollier, aged 45, lay dead in front of the car. He had been shot seven times, the trajectories indicating two separate volleys. Zainab had a bullet wound in her shoulder, and head injuries from what appeared to be a “pistol-whipping”.

(…) Saad was estranged from his brother, Zaid Hilli, at the time of his death and the pair were involved in an increasingly acrimonious dispute over the family inheritance. A reported figure of a £4m estate is vastly overinflated but even so, the dispute had turned nasty.

(…) In the months before his death, the stress of the conflict with Zaid had put Saad in hospital on two occasions with a suspected heart attack. Ikbal had pleaded with friends not to speak to Saad about the dispute, as it gave him palpitations. But could such bitter family discord really be a motive for multiple murders?

(…) A family friend told me that Zainab suffered from car sickness, which was probably why she was sitting in the front, next to her dad. Perhaps she needed fresh air; perhaps she needed to go to the loo; perhaps Zainab and her father got out of the BMW to look at the map on a board at the top of the car park. There cannot have been anything wrong to start with — otherwise, surely, Saad and his daughter would never have got out of the car.

(…) I was told by a senior British police contact that the French authorities suspected the French cyclist was the target, all along. But that simply cannot be true, unless the French have been, and may still be, engaged in a high-stakes game of bluff in which the price is the total destruction of the al-Hillis’ reputation.

Certainly, the French cyclist is a no-go area to the media. His family will not speak, nor will they release a photograph of him. (…) The Sunday Times Magazine spoke to Mollier’s family. In the hairdressing salon where she works, in the town of Ugine, in the Rhône-Alpes, his ex-wife began crying when she recalled what had happened. She had been asked by Mollier’s new partner not to speak and did not want to create difficulties. The family had placed a notice in the local paper, thanking the community for its support and “discretion”. Do they have something to hide, or are they, quite reasonably, asking for privacy in their grief?

The French authorities have assured us they have conducted a thorough investigation of Mollier’s life. But from day one, the prosecutor, Maillaud, was saying Mollier’s death was “collateral” damage and that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maillaud, aged 50 and a career lawyer with little experience beyond regional cases, has looked a lonely, tense figure in his rare appearances before the massed ranks of the international media.

Surrey police are nominally partners in the “joint investigation team”, but are in practice subordinate to the French-led inquiry. Some Surrey officers have been surprised at the low-key use of the media by the French, nowadays a vital part of any significant British investigation. (…)

(William Brett ) Martin thinks the climb from Chevaline had taken about half an hour. It has been reported that he was overtaken by Mollier on the way, but what Martin says is that he saw Mollier ahead of him. Martin was on a mountain bike and Mollier was on an expensive racing model, so his climb would have been much, much quicker, maybe half the time of Martin’s.

(…) I have learnt that a motorbike was seen in the forest on the road above the car park shortly before the murders. The rider was stopped by Forestry Commission workers, who told him he was not allowed on that stretch of road.

It is impossible to be sure, but it seems likely this was the same motorbike seen by Martin, and that the killer was riding it. The police seem satisfied there was one gun, one killer — “one bad man”, as Zainab is reported to have said.

(…) There is something else about Mollier’s presence that is odd and puzzling. We have discovered that he was given the route by his father-in-law, Thierry Schutz, also a keen cyclist and the owner of a successful local pharmacy with €1m (£805,000) in working capital. Schutz’s daughter Claire had just had Mollier’s child, Louis, still only months old.

(…) Mollier was just a production worker, so it was highly unlikely his work had created a motive for murder — and that was not what was odd about him. It was the route Thierry Schutz had given him. We were told that despite his cycling experience he had never taken this route before, and had strayed from it. He had been at the car park “by mistake”, a police source told The Sunday Times.

That would be a terrible coincidence, such a mistake bringing him to the scene of his own murder. Perhaps he had gone there for a reason. Perhaps the motorbike really was waiting for him. He was shot first — we think — and the gunman reserved the most bullets for him. Mollier had to be not just dead, but extremely dead, with seven bullets.

(…) One “leak” has been that the French are unhappy with aspects of Martin’s account, in particular his timings. He has been back to France twice to participate in tests and further interviews. The first time, they dressed him in a bulletproof vest to take him to the scene, clearly afraid he might still be a target.

(…) The French police still think Saad’s brother, Zaid, is a person of suspicion.“If he was in France, he would have been arrested by now,” a police source told me. But Zaid is not in France, he is in Chessington, Surrey, England. Zaid, who is 53, and Saad were both born in Iraq, the only two known children of Kadhim and Fasiha al-Hilli. Kadhim was born in 1919 and was 12 years older than his wife. He had become wealthy in business as a merchant, and the family were cultured and well educated.

It is widely reported that the family fell out with the political party of Saddam Hussein — not true. A friend and fellow émigré, Zaid Alabdi, told me that many wealthy Iraqis left when the country became a republic and they feared losing their wealth. The family came to Britain in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and the boys went to school in Pimlico, central London. In 1984 the family moved to Claygate, paying £28,000 for the house on Oaken Lane, now worth about £650,000. Hardly a mansion, but it was eventually left to Saad alone.

(…) Saad dated some local girls in Surrey — two quite long-term relationships among them — before he met Ikbal, an Iraqi dentist, during a trip to the United Arab Emirates, where she was living. They returned to Surrey and married at the register office in Weybridge. From the accounts I heard from friends and family, it was a successful, loving relationship right up until their deaths. Saad worked hard but did not earn much as a mechanical engineer. His friend James Mathews told me Saad had earned £28,000 last year and was between contracts at his most regular employer, Surrey Satellite Technology, when he went on holiday.

(…) In an online conversation Saad told another friend, Gary Aked, that he had brought his father’s body back against his brother’s will. “My brother wanted to leave him there.” I suppose it’s cheaper to leave him? “Yes, that’s why he wanted to do that.” It had cost £15,000 to repatriate his father’s body. I suppose you paid? “Yes, who else?”

A few years ago, Saad armed himself with the deeds of the old family home in Baghdad, and visited Iraq to try to find out what happened to the property. It had been taken over by the Iraqi police. According to Mathews, Saad was beaten up by the police when he tried to prove his ownership of the property.

(…) In this conversation, Saad said his brother had made a will for his father, which he had not told Saad about: “I put half this house in his name when my mother died and now he wants me to buy half of it from him for 400k when he has put nothing into it. And all my work and earnings have gone into this house, you know how hard I worked on it… Please be there in court to tell them when I need you. Because I think this is where it will end up.”