It has been almost a decade since the bullet-ridden bodies of a British-Iraqi family and a French cyclist were found on a deserted road in the French Alps on September 5, 2012. Saad Al-Hilli, 50, the his wife, Iqbal, 47, and his mother, Suhaila Al-Allaf, 74, were found dead in his slow-moving brown BMW. The lifeless body of 45-year-old French cyclist Sylvain Mollier was near the car. Zainab, the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, was found outside the car, with a pistol whipped with a shot to the shoulder and her 4-year-old sister Zeena, hiding under her mother’s body in the back seat.
More than 800 witnesses in France, England, Italy, Switzerland and Iraq have been heard in the dead-end investigation, which has been full of conspiracy theories, ranging from reports that patriarch Saad Al-Hilli was a runner. of money for Saddam Hussein millions thanks to rumors of secret bank accounts and a family dispute, assuming it was an ambush of a secret meeting between Mollier and Al-Hilli. In 2013, Al-Hilli’s older brother was accused of ordering a coup on his brother, but was later released due to a lack of evidence of any killers.
Blood splatter tests posed an unsolvable mystery. Patriarch Al-Hilli was shot dead inside the locked car, but had the cyclist’s blood on his clothes. The 7-year-old girl found outside the vehicle had the cyclist’s blood on her feet.
The case, still open, has been inactive for years.
But this week, a strange connection to the attempted murder of French hypnotist Marie-Hélène Dini, 55, near Paris, may help solve the case. Dini learned that last year he had narrowly escaped the murder of a platoon that French police said was hired by his professional rival for about $ 85,000. The rival, who was also arrested, said she only hired the men to watch over her and not kill her.
Police were called to Dini’s home in the Parisian suburb of Creteil last July when a naughty neighbor called that two suspicious-looking men were assimilating the neighborhood. Police found the men, who were wearing black clothes and gloves, with a Luger Po6 pistol and a muffler sitting in a car with fake license plates. Police were told they were on an “official mission” to shoot the hypnotist because of her alleged dealings with the Israeli secret police known as the Mossad.
Police arrested the couple and found that they were paid killers, linked to other murders. They say the men, one of whom was a retired police officer, had met through a “small group of bricks who had given their hands to the completion of successful contracts,” French media reported. Dini told police he had no association with the Mossad and has since left the Paris area.
Their weapons and ammunition were then analyzed to try to find a connection to unsolved crimes. Two other killings have already been linked to the hit squad and French police reported on Friday that the exact type of bullets from their loaded weapon intended for the innkeeper were used to kill the Al-Hilli family and the French cyclist in the Alps. Researchers are now studying who could have hired the men and whether Al-Hilli or the French cyclist – or both – were the intended targets and why.