L’Would the so-called Chevaline slaughter affair experience a new twist? The Chambéry research section placed a person in police custody on Wednesday January 12 as part of the quadruple murder that occurred in 2012, and still unclear to this day. This man is a witness exonerated in 2015, whose custody is “not justified”, denounced his lawyer.
“He has the feeling, perhaps wrongly (…) but it is a feeling that I share, to be in police custody for free”, denounced in front of journalists Jean-Christophe Basson-Larbi in front of the Chambéry gendarmerie Wednesday evening. For the lawyer, police custody “weighs on the head of this man the weight of life imprisonment even though it is to check a schedule”.
On Wednesday morning, the Annecy Line Bonnet prosecutor had indicated that this police custody in the so-called “Chevaline killing” case aimed “to carry out timetable checks” and “searches” at this home. Mr. Basson-Larbi clarified that his client, “who has always been keen to participate in the manifestation of the truth”, had “already been aware of this affair” in the past but that he had been put “out cause in 2015 ”. However, the lawyer did not wish to reveal the identity of his client.
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“Today, the position of this gentleman is still the same: I was walking (…) He crossed the road of motorists perhaps but he did not cross the road of this poor family”, a added the lawyer. “My intimate conviction this evening, in what he gave me to see, what I saw of him, what I perceived of him, is that this man has, at no time , the profile of a person who could have committed in cold blood, with premeditation, such an assassination “, further assured Me Basson-Larbi.
Mysterious biker
The case begins in the afternoon of September 5, 2012, on the shores of Lake Annecy. A British cyclist, Brett Martin, sees, at the end of the small forest road of the Combe d’Ire, a bicycle lying on the ground, a BMW, engine running, and a bloody little girl, who staggers then collapses. Thinking first of a road accident, he quickly realizes that it is a murder. In the car, the driver and his two passengers were shot several times in the head. The little girl, shot in the shoulder, suffers serious injuries to the head. Finally, a cyclist lies on the ground, his body riddled with bullets.
A second girl, unharmed, will be found curled up under her mother’s legs more than eight hours after the killing. The crime scene had been “frozen” until the arrival, during the night, of the Parisian technicians from the gendarmerie. Saad al-Hilli’s older brother, who was in conflict with him over paternal inheritance, was taken into police custody on June 24, 2013 in the United Kingdom, then under judicial supervision until January 2014.
Within the al-Hilli family, some tend to favor a murder linked to industrial espionage. Saad was an engineer specializing in satellites. The trail of a biker seen near the scene of the crime had been ruled out more than two years after the tragedy when it was established that it was a business manager adept at paragliding, sighted by chance near the scene of the crime. Crossed by agents of the National Forestry Office (ONF), this man, wearing the goat and a black helmet, had long served as the main suspect.
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Judicial enigma
The Chevaline affair has already given rise to thousands of hours of investigation and hearings, tons of documents peeled and four arrests, without revealing its mystery. The case is one of the great legal enigmas that have held France in suspense for the past fifty years.
Coincidence of the calendar, the Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, announced the launch on Wednesday, the 1er March in Nanterre, a judicial center “dedicated to serial and unsolved crimes” in order to “allow these cases to remain judicially alive”. France has 173 unsolved crimes for which justice is seized and 68 procedures for serial crimes, according to him.
Among the most publicized, the Grégory Villemin affair, this boy found dead in Vologne (Vosges) in 1984, the Chevaline affair or even the disappearance 19 years ago of Estelle Mouzin, a case in which eight magistrates succeeded .