Ten years after the facts, it’s a big twist in a case that remains full of mysteries. The police custody of the man questioned since Wednesday morning in the investigation into the 2012 quadruple murder in Chevaline, Haute-Savoie, has been extended, announced the Annecy prosecutor on the night of Wednesday to Thursday.
The placement of a man in police custody by the Chambéry research section in the context of the so-called “Chevaline killing” case, had been announced by the Annecy prosecutor on Wednesday morning. “This police custody aims to carry out time checks” and “searches are underway at the home” of that person, she said.
New information will be made public at the end of the police custody, she added, stressing however that this “may give nothing”. “We are extremely careful about the identification elements”, she insisted, recalling that “the procedure is covered by the secrecy of the instruction”.
Faced with a few journalists who were waiting for him in front of the Chambéry gendarmerie on Wednesday evening, the lawyer for the suspect Jean-Christophe Basson-Larbi simply indicated that he was a witness exonerated in 2015. According to the council , his custody is not “not justified” because the latter has “always had at heart to participate in the manifestation of the truth”.
Several newspapers, including Le Dauphiné Libéré, indicate that the suspect questioned is a biker who had been exonerated in 2015 after being searched for two years, but the prosecutor did not wish to confirm this information, calling again for the caution in this case.
No satisfactory lead
On September 5, 2012, a 50-year-old Briton of Iraqi origin, Saad al-Hilli, his wife and his mother-in-law were found dead, shot several times in the head, in their car on a country road near Chevaline, not far from Lake Annecy. A young girl from the couple was seriously injured, while her little sister was found unharmed, curled up under her mother’s legs. A cyclist from the region, a probable collateral victim, was also shot dead.
To date, these murders have not been elucidated. Many avenues have been explored by the courts (family conflict on the background of inheritance, industrial espionage, mad shooter, etc.) without any of them proving, for the time being, conclusive. But soon ten years after the killing, the investigations continue, tirelessly. In September, the scene of the crime was the scene of new acts of investigation, “frozen” for two days by the research section of the gendarmerie of Chambéry. “It is a classic act of investigation, it is not linked to new twists and we do not expect to discover particular things”, had then deflated Line Bonnet-Mathis, public prosecutor of Annecy.
Update Thursday at 10:50 a.m. with the extension of police custody.