Chevaline slaughter: nearly ten years after the facts, a suspect in police custody

Published on : 01/12/2022 – 14:52

Progress in the Chevaline massacre affair? “A person was taken into custody on January 12, 2022 at 8:05 am by the research section of Chambéry in connection with the assassination of the Al-Hilli family and Sylvain Mollier, known as the” Chevaline affair “on September 5 2012, said Annecy Line Bonnet’s prosecutor in a press release, confirming information from BFM TV.

“This custody aims to carry out checks on the schedule” and “searches are underway at the home” of this person, she said. New information will be made public at the end of the custody, she added, stressing however that it “may not give anything”. “We are extremely cautious on the elements of identification”, she added, recalling that “the procedure is covered by the secrecy of the instruction”.

On September 5, 2012, a Briton of Iraqi origin, Saad al-Hilli, 50, his wife of 47 years and his stepmother of 74 years were found dead, with several bullets in the head, in their car on a country road near Chevaline, not far from Lake Annecy.

One of the Hilli couple’s daughters was seriously injured while the second, curled up under her mother’s legs, miraculously escaped unharmed. A cyclist from the region, Sylvain Mollier, 45, a probable collateral victim, was also shot dead.

The mysterious biker, the track dismissed

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 massacre. The crime scene had been “frozen” until the arrival, in the night, of the Parisian technicians of 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 Hilli family, some lean rather for 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 had been 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.

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 on Wednesday the launch, on March 1, in Nanterre, of 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, nineteen years ago, of Estelle Mouzin, a case in which eight magistrates succeeded one another.

With AFP