Girl spent hours beneath bodies in French Alps

CHEVALINE, France: Immobilized with fear, a 4-year-old British girl huddled for eight hours beneath the legs of her slain mother in a car filled with corpses on a remote Alpine road — all while French investigators stood nearby, unaware she was there.
The stunning discovery of the girl yesterday, apparently unharmed, heightened the drama around a mysterious shooting rampage that left four adults dead and a 7-year-old girl hospitalized with bullet wounds and skull fractures in the French Alps.
The reason for the slayings, in a wooded area near the eastern village of Chevaline, remains unclear.
All the bodies were found in or near a car that prosecutors say belonged to a British family vacationing at a campground on the shores of Lake Annecy, a popular retreat in the French Alps. The owners of the campground told investigators the victims included two parents and a grandmother.
French authorities struggled to explain why the 4-year-old wasn’t discovered earlier and was left for hours alone in the back seat of a car with the corpses.
Police arrived Wednesday to find a man’s body in the front seat and two women in the back, and another dead man near a bicycle with no known ties to the other victims nearby. That fourth victim was a French cyclist who apparently stumbled across the grisly scene, police said.
Investigators identified the driver of the car as Saad al Hilli, a British citizen from a London suburb who was born in Baghdad in 1962, according to the Sipa news agency. Police in Surrey, a largely suburban county southwest of London, said they are talking with French authorities about the case.
The 7-year-old girl was discovered near the car with bullet wounds and skull fractures and was hospitalized, Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud said. The names of the children and other victims were not released, and their relationships to each other remain unclear.
A second cyclist who discovered all the bodies alerted authorities around 4 p.m. Wednesday; the car was under guard until midnight, when special investigators arrived from the Paris area and found the girl.
“We discovered a little 4-year-old girl that no one noticed earlier because she wasn’t moving. Probably terrified, she was completely immobile among the bodies. She was later examined and she is doing OK,” Maillaud said.
Maillaud said as soon as investigators opened the door, the girl emerged, smiled and reached out her arms; she spoke English but couldn’t describe what had happened and was taken into police care.
“She is in a hospital but her life is not threatened despite going through a tragedy by losing her family in such atrocious conditions,” he said.