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. “A person was taken into custody on January 12, 2022 at 8:05 am by the Chambéry research section in connection with the assassination of the Al-Hilli family and Sylvain Mollier, known as the Chevaline affair”, the September 5, 2012, according to the statements of the prosecutor of Chambéry.
“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 50-year-old Briton 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 young girl in 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.
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Mysterious biker
The case begins in the followingnoon 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 car 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 following 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 following 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 1is 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 .
