French police re-examine Alps murder crime scene

ANNECY, France: French police struggling to make sense of a quadruple murder at an Alpine beauty spot said yesterday they were re-examining the crime scene.
Around 25 police on Saturday combed a large area for clues but failed to turn up anything of interest, said the police commander of the eastern Haute-Savoie department Bertrand Francois.
Investigators were also trying to nail down the exact movements of the Al-Hilli family before they were gunned down along with a French cyclist near Annecy last Wednesday, added police officer Benoit Vinneman.
Saad Al-Hilli, his wife Ikbal and an elderly relative died in the attack during a family camping holiday. The couple’s two young daughters survived.
Around 25 casings were found at the scene of the killing but officers have said they will not disclose ballistics analysis for fear of compromising the investigation.
All four victims were killed by two gun shots to the head, fuelling suspicions that the murders were a professional hit.
The four-year-old girl who survived the killing returned to Britain yesterday as police again quizzed relatives and scoured the family home.
Zeena Al-Hilli was accompanied by an aunt and uncle who travelled to France to bring her home, a source close to the investigation told AFP on condition of anonymity.
She and her seven-year-old sister Zainab were the only survivors of an attack that saw her father Saad Al-Hilli, mother Ikbal and an elderly female relative gunned down in their car on a forested Alpine road. A passing cyclist was also killed. Her uncle Zaid Al-Hilli will face a second day of questioning from investigators, the source added. Zaid presented himself to police in Britain following the murder, denying media reports that the brothers were involved in a financial dispute.
British forensics teams began a second day of searches at the family home in Claygate, a quiet, wealthy commuter village some 15 miles (25 kilometers) southwest of London.
Saad Al-Hilli, a 50-year-old naturalized Briton of Iraqi origin, worked as a mechanical design engineer with the Surrey Satellite Technology firm.
Zeena survived the attack by hiding under her dead mother’s skirt in the backseat and remained motionless inside the vehicle with the corpses for eight hours before police found her.
Her elder sister Zainab was shot in the shoulder and beaten around the head, suffering a fractured skull. She remains in a medically-induced coma in a hospital in Grenoble.
Police are treating her as a “key witness” and hope she can provide some clues once she wakes up.
“The investigators want to speak to her as quickly as possible and with the greatest sensitivity possible,” prosecutor Eric Maillaud told reporters in Annecy.
“It is out of the question to go and interview her in any sort of rushed way. She is extremely traumatized. Only the doctors have the ability to say (when she can be interviewed) and until I get the green light I will do nothing,” Maillaud said.
He has ruled out getting any information from Zeena.
“All that time she was hiding, terrorized behind her mother’s legs. She saw nothing,” he said.
Autopsies revealed that each of the four victims was shot twice in the head.
“The whole scene was played out in a very, very short time,” Maillaud said.
British and French police began scouring the family home in Claygate for any clues in helping solve the murder on Saturday.
Five French investigators led by Colonel Marc de Tarle are in Britain to work on the case, though they did not all visit the house.
“This is an inquiry which is turning out to be long and complex,” De Tarle said.
Maillaud said the search of the home would help to build up a profile of the family, while stressing that there should be no presumption that they were involved in any activity which might have made them targets.