On September 5, 2012, three members of the same family and a cyclist were shot dead in Chevaline, Haute-Savoie. Despite a few twists and turns, the case is still not resolved, ten years later.
On September 5, 2012, Saah al-Hilli, an Iraqi-born British aeronautical consultant, was found dead in his car with his wife and mother-in-law, in a parking lot on a mountain road, near Chevaline, in Haute-Savoie. All three victims were shot in the head. The couple’s two daughters were the only survivors of this tragedy. The eldest, aged 7, was found seriously injured near her parents’ vehicle. She suffered from a fractured skull and had been hit by a bullet in the shoulder. Her 4-year-old sister was found unharmed, curled up under her mother’s legs. Sylvain Mollier, a Savoyard cyclist, was also killed, hit by seven bullets. But who could have committed this crime? Despite the twists, the mystery surrounding this case remains ten more later.
The investigation first focused on Saah al-Hilli’s older brother Zaid. The two men reportedly had a disagreement. In question ? The legacy of their father. If he presented himself to the police the day after the tragedy to affirm his innocence, he was still taken into custody a few months laterJune 23, 2013. Investigators once thought that Zaid al-Hilli might have hired a professional to eliminate his brother. He is finally releasedthirty-six hours later.
Biker arrested twice
After dismissing the trail of the family drama, the investigators collected, for nearly two years, hundreds of testimonies. Several people were also interviewed. On February 18, 2014, a former municipal policeman, who is also a gun collector, was arrested. He was cleared a few days later. One year later, on March 7, 2015, a new suspect was arrested. He is a motorcyclist, who had been seen at the scene of the crime by William Brett Martin, the cyclist having discovered the scene. His composite portrait was released in November 2013. This entrepreneur from the Lyon region was in Haute-Savoie for a paragliding baptism. He was therefore released.
But hope is reborn whenhe was again arrested and taken into custody on January 12, 2022, for “schedule checks”. His lawyer, Jean-Christophe Basson-Larbi, reacted to this arrest and confirmed his client’s innocence with France Televisions: “My client is someone who has always had the manifestation of the truth at heart. Someone who has taken a lot of his time to try to contribute to the work of the investigators, and who today is living a real nightmare.” The biker was finally released on January 13.
A few weeks later, in February 2022, Line Bonnet, the Annecy public prosecutor, told La Tribune de Genève that the investigators were not “not very far” to solve this case. “We will succeed thanks to scientific evidence”she said in this interview, relayed by West France. Remarks that she wanted to qualify with our colleagues from the Dauphiné liberatedstating in particular that this interview had been carried out “a long time ago”. Line Bonnet then spoke of a “total extrapolation”, before claiming that they had “certainly good hope to solve this investigation but not more than today than yesterday or the day before yesterday. She then announced that there was “nothing new currently. No custody in progress or to come”. Investigations to elucidate this crime are still ongoing. Three investigators are working full-time on this file.