Chevaline massacre: the suspect’s police custody lifted, no charge retained

On Wednesday morning, a source familiar with the matter told TF1 / LCI that a person had been placed in police custody as part of the investigation into the Chevaline massacre, which occurred almost ten years ago. This was extended to Wednesday evening. According to concordant sources, he is a biker who had already been heard as a witness in 2015.

The public prosecutor of Annecy had confirmed that this measure had been taken “against a person this Wednesday, January 12, 2022 at 8:05 a.m. by the research section of Chambéry in the context of the assassination of the Al Hilli family and Sylvain Mollier, known as the Chevaline affair on September 5, 2012 “. The magistrate specifies that it is a question, with this police custody of “carry out timetable checks”.

The police custody was finally lifted this Thursday at 5.30 p.m. by decision of the investigating judges of the Annecy court.“No charge was brought against the person in custody. The explanations given and the checks carried out made it possible to rule out his possible participation in the facts”, specifies the public prosecutor Lise Bonnet in a press release.

The investigations are continuing. Three investigators are working full time on this case.

On September 5, 2012, a 50-year-old British of Iraqi origin, Saad al-Hilli, his wife and his mother-in-law were found dead, with several bullets in the head, in their car on a country road near Chevaline, not far from Lake Annecy. A little girl of the couple is seriously injured, while her little sister is found unharmed, curled up under her mother’s legs. A local cyclist, a probable collateral victim, was also killed. This is Sylvain Mollier.

A few months after the events, in April 2013, the gendarmes had launched an appeal for witnesses. In April of the same year, the investigators had released the composite portrait of a biker who had been seen at the scene of the quadruple murder in Haute-Savoie, in September 2012. Identified in 2015, this man, business manager, was finally cleared.

In addition, the older brother of Saad al-Hilli, who was in conflict with him concerning the paternal inheritance, had been placed in police custody on June 24, 2013 in the United Kingdom, then under judicial supervision until January 2014. Within the al-Hilli family, some lean more towards a murder linked to industrial espionage (Saad was an engineer specializing in satellites).