The Shootings (Part 2)

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Hi, Park Enthusiasts.

I'm your host, Delia Diambra.

And today's episode is part two of a story I started to tell you last week about the 2012 Lake Annecy murders in France.

If you haven't already, go back and listen to part one.

Like I mentioned before, there was no way I could cover this investigation in a single episode.

So splitting it into two parts seemed like the best way to go as deep as I could on each detail without missing any ground I needed to cover.

To briefly recap, it was Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 when an unknown shooter gunned down 50-year-old British citizen Saad al-Hille, his 47-year-old wife Iqbal, and Iqbal's mother, Zahela.

The family had left their campsite near Lake Annecy and gone sightseeing that afternoon.

Saad had just parked the family's car in a small remote mountain parking lot when shots rang out.

A cyclist, 45-year-old French native Sylvain Molier, was also killed in the attack.

French police initially believed he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was Saad who'd been intentionally targeted.

The only survivors were the Alhili's two daughters, four-year-old Zina and seven-year-old Zaina.

Because the family was from England, French authorities had to work closely with British investigators to try and figure out what exactly happened.

The French zeroed in pretty quickly on Saad's older brother, Zaid Alhili, as a suspect because of an ongoing inheritance dispute between the two men.

However, the physical evidence in the case and witness testimony didn't point to Zaid as the trigger man.

Despite that, though, nine months after the shootings, British authorities arrested him for conspiracy to commit murder.

But those detectives working the case alongside the team from France weren't totally sold on that theory.

They believed that the elder Al-Hilli brother was most likely innocent.

In fact, they pondered whether everyone had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.

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In May 2013, eight months into the Lake Annecy quadruple murder investigation, a British investigator named Mark Preston took charge of the British police's side of things.

As senior investigating officer, he wasn't convinced that Eric Mayode, the French prosecutor spearheading the investigation, had made the best call by publicly labeling Zaid al-Hilli as the alleged mastermind behind the crime.

At no point during the investigation had police found a shred of evidence linking him to the murders.

And even when they probed the financial dispute between him and Saad about their late parents' estate, There was nothing that rose to the level of motive.

At least not that Mark saw.

When he came into the investigation, he entered with eyes wide open and approached everything with a fresh perspective.

His main goal was to look at the crime from all angles and look for leads that had possibly been missed and even theories that no one had thought of.

One of the first things Mark did was visit the crime scene in the mountains near Lake Annecy.

And going there in person really left an impression on him because he was able to see for himself just how small and secluded the crime scene was.

He found himself asking several critical questions.

Like, for example, how, if the shooter had laid in wait like everyone up until that point had assumed, had he known that the victims would be there in the mountains and on the remote one-lane road on the afternoon of September 5th?

If you remember from last episode, the Alhilis' whole holiday to France had reportedly been planned at the last minute.

They'd been vacationing in and around Lake Annecy for several days leading up to September 5th.

So Mark wondered, why hadn't the killer struck during one of those times if Saad was really his target?

Had the shooter been able to predict the family's movements?

Mark didn't think that was the case.

The family's drive to Site-C in the French Alps and possibly cross the border into Switzerland had seemingly happened on a whim, which kind of made it either impossible or sheer luck that the gunman had been able to target them while they were in transit.

Mark's big question boiled down to this.

How did the shooter know that the Alhilles or Sylvain Molier would be where they were on the afternoon of September 5th?

Had he followed one of the parties there?

Had he laid in wait ahead of time?

If the answer to one or both of those questions was yes, then Mark's next questions were, how

and why?

Police's initial assumption all along had been that the shooter had hidden himself in a nearby gully and waited for the precise moment that Saad exited his family's car.

But after spending time observing and studying the crime, Mark no longer believed that was the case.

He told producers for the docus series Murder in the Alps that when he visited the crime scene, he realized the nearby gully was too low and wouldn't have been a good hiding place for the shooter because it didn't have a clear line of sight of the roadway or the small parking lot across the street.

He also said that there were a number of spent bullet casings concentrated in one particular spot on the ground, right in front of a section of the tree line located somewhat diagonally from the pull-off, which in his opinion had actually been where the killer stood at the start of the attack.

If that was the location where the shooter had started firing first, then Mark realized the Alhilles would have been the furthest distance from him when he started shooting.

Mark began to wonder if perhaps Saad had never been the killer's target, but instead, Sylvain Molier, the French cyclist.

Basically, when Mark reassessed a lot of things about the crime scene, including all the victims' gunshot wounds and where their bodies had ended up, he'd come to the conclusion that there was no doubt Sylvain had been the first person shot.

And not only that, he'd been shot more times than anyone else at the crime scene.

According to the source material, Saad, Iqbal, and Iqbal's mother had each suffered anywhere from three to four gunshot wounds, but for sure at least one to each of their heads.

Sylvain, on the other hand, had been shot at least five times, twice in the front, a few times in the back, and then a final gunshot wound to his head, which was described as being through his eye, an execution-style wound.

At least one source I read stated that he was also reported to have injuries from the family's car striking him when it spun out of control after the shooting.

But taking all of this into consideration, Mark's theory that he'd been the target all along and not Saad al-Hilly very much went against what French prosecutor Eric Mayode had been telling the press since day one.

It seems like it was at this point in time, so roughly 10 months or so into the investigation, that the relationship between French investigators and detectives from England, like Mark, really began to deteriorate.

Zayed Al-Hilli was still maintaining his innocence and tried his darndest to get investigators from both countries to stop focusing on him and instead look at other avenues of investigation.

After his arrest, he was questioned for a full day about his suspected role in the killings, but his lawyer advised him not to comment on anything being asked of him during that interrogation.

So authorities got nothing and ultimately he was released on bail while their investigation continued.

A few months later on the one-year anniversary of the crime, Eric Mayode held a press conference alongside the investigating team from England, which included Mark Preston.

Eric told reporters that the case was complex and probably going to take a long time to solve.

He emphasized, like he'd done all along, that the key to the mystery was somewhere in the Alhilli family's background.

He doubled down that they were the intended targets, not Sylvain Molier.

He also insisted that many signs pointed to Zaid Alhilli as the orchestrator of the crime, despite there being no evidence to back that claim up.

Eric told the press that his team had found circumstantial evidence that strongly suggested Saad had lived in fear of his brother and their relationship was much worse off than Zaid would admit.

But Mark Preston believed Eric's comments at the press conference were problematic, maybe even outright inappropriate.

He told producers for the docuseries Murder in the Alps that it wasn't right for Eric to state so matter-of-factly that Sylvain Molier was not the intended target.

Because in reality, Sylvain's life had never been fully investigated.

Turns out, the 45-year-old had a decent amount of alleged personal drama that Mark thought could have made him a prime target for murder.

According to reporting by Harriet Alexander for the Sunday Telegraph, at the time of his death, Sylvan had just taken a long leave of absence from his job working as a welder, which the Sunday Telegraph explained was actually paternity leave since he'd just welcomed a son with his new partner a few months before the murders.

But what that source and others explain in more detail is that Sylvan wasn't just some guy welding pipes or doing average metal work.

The factory he worked at was actually owned by a nuclear company and produced components for the nuclear industry.

A fairly unique and, I imagine, sensitive trade.

So naturally, that connection made some folks wonder if maybe he'd been killed over something related to his employer.

But Salon's loved ones, when they did briefly speak to the press, denounced such theories.

One of his aunts told the Sunday Telegraph that people suggesting he was somehow involved in secret projects or new sensitive information and that's what got him killed was nonsense.

She described him as a quiet guy who lived a fairly uncomplicated life.

She remarked, quote, he had no enemies.

He was very friendly and charming.

There's no way that he was the cause of all this.

She later continued, The only thing we know for sure is that Silvan wasn't up to anything strange, but I don't think we'll ever know what really happened, end quote.

Despite his family's doubts that he was the intended target, rumors continued to swirl about Sylvan's employer and his personal life.

For example, there was one theory that speculated maybe he and Saad had arranged to meet up and pass off secret information, you know, since both of their jobs tangentially involved the nuclear industry.

But of course, that was all just conjecture.

Nothing definitively backed that theory up.

And according to an article by Le Parisienne, that sort of conflicted with some information about Sylvan's movements and communications on the day of the attack.

According to that publication's news coverage, around 3.28 p.m., so minutes before the shooting, Sylvan's ex-wife and the mother of two of his sons had called him twice to discuss something about one of their boys' schools.

The first call, Sylvain didn't answer, but the second one, he did.

The couple talked briefly, and according to the coverage, Sylvan was said to be out of breath during the conversation.

But I couldn't find anywhere in the source material where exactly Sylvan was when that call happened.

Like, was he pulling over into the gravel lot where he was about to be killed?

Did his ex-wife literally talk to him seconds before he was shot?

I just don't know.

But there was another theory, which Zaid Al-Hilli, as well as British investigator Mark Preston, emphasized to producers for the docuseries Murder in the Alps.

that seemed to have a bit more teeth to it.

And it involved reported beef between Sylvan and his partner Claire's family.

According to the source material I read, Claire came from a wealthy family who owned a pharmacy business in the Haute-Savoie region.

That company was reported to be worth more than 1 million pounds, which is like somewhere in the ballpark of 1.3 million US dollars at today's exchange rate, not taking into account inflation.

Interviewees told producers for Murder in the Alps that Sylvain had apparently become more and more reliant on Claire's family's wealth, even to the point where he'd allegedly used money from her inheritance to purchase the expensive bike he was riding on the day he was killed.

The Evening Standard reported that things had kind of been tumultuous between him and Claire's family about the fact that the family's pharmacy business was going to be transferred to her, which in turn meant proceeds from it would trickle down to Sylvain because of his relationship with her.

Now, in the wake of the shootings, Claire's family was noticeably quiet, like legit radio silence.

They didn't do any interviews and hired a lawyer to monitor the press.

Journalists definitely noticed that the family was keeping an unusually low profile and they wanted to know why.

The family's lawyer later explained that the reason Claire had never issued a public statement was because she didn't want to interfere with law enforcement's investigation and she genuinely wanted everyone to give her and her family privacy.

British detective Mark Preston told producers for Murder in the Alps that while looking more closely into Sylvan's background, his team received the full ballistics report from the French investigative team.

And it painted a profound picture of just how intentional the shots fired at Sylvain had been.

Mark said that the angle of the first shots to him indicated that he had been bending down, possibly sorting something out with his bike chain when the shooter stood right in front of him and fired two shots.

After getting hit, Sylvain had turned and seemingly tried to run away, but had taken more shots to his back, which caused him to collapse in the gravel parking lot, right in the same area where the Alhillis had parked their car.

The last shot Sylvain sustained was to his head, and Mark described it as an execution-style shot.

Like it was almost personal.

Unfortunately, though, because more than 20 shots had been fired at the crime scene in such a short amount of time, it was impossible to determine with any kind of certainty whether Saad had been hit first or if it was Sylvain who'd taken the first shot.

After Mark did a thorough review of the ballistics evidence, he met with French officials and asked straight up if they were going to dig further into Sylvain's life to see if there was anyone who might have had a grudge against him.

He told producers for Murder in the Alps that Eric Mayode and his team assured him they were doing that, but Mark said he never got the vibe that was actually happening.

Around this time, it was announced that Zainab and Zina Al-Hilli would be raised in Britain by an aunt and uncle on their mom's side of the family.

A judge had ruled it was in the girl's best interest to grow up with relatives by their side.

BBC reported that they were both still living under aliases the government had given them after the murder since the killer was still at large.

French authorities, though, had also explored another avenue of investigation, thousands of miles away in New Orleans, Louisiana, where FBI agents were conducting their own investigation into another member of the Alhilli family.

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According to reporting in the docuseries Murder in the Alps, not long after news broke about the Lake Annecy shootings, A woman named Judy Weatherly, who was living all the way in Louisiana, received a phone call and text from someone claiming to be with the FBI.

Turns out the person calling and texting her was a legit FBI agent, and they asked Judy if she'd heard anything about the death of her former sister-in-law, Kelly Thompson.

Judy was completely caught off guard by the inquiry because she hadn't seen or heard from Kelly in years.

In July 1999, Kelly had married Judy's brother, Jim Thompson.

But after about 18 months or so together in a relationship that was described as good and loving, the couple's marriage abruptly ended when Kelly left Louisiana and moved overseas.

Judy told producers for Murder in the Alps that she was sad when Kelly left because the two had become friends.

Even more puzzling was that Kelly had never explained why she'd taken off so abruptly.

In 2012, when the FBI agent informed Judy over the phone that Kelly had been killed in a really horrible way in France, She was heartbroken and also kind of confused because she was also informed that the name Kelly Thompson was not her former sister-in-law's true identity.

Yep, you guessed it.

Kelly Thompson was in fact Iqbal Al-Hilli.

According to the available source material, Iqbal had moved to America from Iraq in the late 1990s and made a life for herself in Louisiana.

This happened several years prior to her meeting and marrying Saad.

While living in Louisiana, she'd met Jim Thompson and gotten married.

During her time in the U.S., she'd worn traditional Western clothing and been a much different person than who her neighbors and friends in England would eventually describe her as.

Apparently, Iqbal was just much more quiet and reserved while married to Saad, and her friends in England described her as more mindful of her Iraqi and Muslim heritage.

But the same couldn't be said when she'd been married to Jim in Louisiana.

Anyway, when British and French investigators looking into the murders found out about her prior life and identity in America, they had to at least entertain the idea that maybe someone in her past might be involved with or responsible for her and her family's murders.

I mean, I imagine it had to have felt super sus to police that she'd called herself Kelly Thompson while living in the States and been essentially a completely different person for a few years.

Then all of a sudden abandoned that life and moved to England.

Detectives' first stop was looking at her ex-husband, Jim Thompson.

Investigators wondered if maybe he'd stalked Iqbal after their divorce and enacted revenge for her leaving him.

Turns out, Jim had a thing for motorcycles and shared similar features to the unknown man that witnesses had seen riding a motorbike in the vicinity of the crime scene.

But that theory or any emerging suspicions about Jim quickly fizzled out because authorities learned that he'd actually died of a reported heart attack, get this, on September 5th, 2012, the same exact day as the Lake Annecy murders.

I know, wild, right?

Investigators thought that was a strange coincidence too, perhaps too coincidental.

So authorities told producers for Murder in the Alps that they were then forced to investigate whether or not Jim's untimely death was possibly linked to the Lake Annecy case.

Maybe Iqbal had been the target of the crime all along, and whoever was responsible had needed to eliminate Jim as well because of something she might have shared with him during their brief marriage.

You see, Jim had never had any post-mortem tests done after his death, like an autopsy.

As far as everyone in his life was concerned, he'd simply died of a heart attack.

A few of his friends thought that him not having post-mortem tests was a bit unexpected, but they sort of just let it go.

However, I assume overseas investigators really saw these circumstances as too bizarre to believe.

So they asked Jim's children, who were from a previous relationship, if they could exhume his body to have it tested for factors which may have contributed to him having a heart attack.

But his kids denied that request.

They didn't think Jim had been murdered and weren't about to disturb their dad from his final resting place on a what-if.

So in the end, investigators couldn't probe Jim's death any further and that avenue of investigation came to a halt.

By January 2014, 16 months after the murders, things in the investigation were pretty much at a standstill.

Police hadn't made any significant progress, and Saad's brother was out on bail, still suspected of being involved in the crime, despite there being no concrete evidence against him.

His situation changed, though, a little over two weeks into the new year, when Mark Preston and his team of investigators in Britain officially cleared Zaid of any involvement in the crime and dropped the conspiracy to murder charge against him.

Zaid was obviously elated by the news that he was no longer facing criminal charges, and I imagine relieved to know that authorities from Britain were officially swinging their focus off of him and onto whoever was actually responsible for killing his relatives and Sylvain Molier.

The French, however, still considered him a suspect and told the press as much.

Shortly before all of this was announced, French investigators had decided to publicly release the composite sketch of the mysterious motorcyclist who'd been seen riding in the mountains on the day of the crime.

He was described as having a goatee-style beard and wore a motorcycle helmet that opened from the side.

When French authorities did some digging into the helmet's fairly unique way of opening, they learned there had only been 8,000 of them ever made.

To probe the matter further, authorities consulted with customers who'd purchased the helmets like it, as well as people in the motorcycle industry.

But unfortunately, detectives were unable to track down every helmet, and thus, they were still out of luck when it came to finding their suspect.

So British investigator Mark Preston refocused his energy on trying to learn more about the alleged murder weapon, which I mentioned in part one, was determined to be a Luger P0629 semi-automatic pistol.

Now, even though that handgun was a standard-issue firearm given to people who enlisted in the Swiss Army or police force, it wasn't a modern gun, which to Mark indicated it was probably owned by someone local who'd kept it in their family, maybe as an heirloom.

and likely had prior police or military experience.

A former Royal Marine who consulted on the case and spoke to producers for Murder in the Alps said he didn't think the shooter was a professional hitman, mostly because he'd made a lot of what appeared to be mistakes at the crime scene.

For example, this consultant said that regardless of whether Saad was the target or Sylvan, the shooter had allowed Saad enough time to get into his car and nearly get away, which according to this expert, wasn't something a professional killer would have let happen.

There was no doubt the shooter knew his way around a firearm, though, but why exactly he'd chosen to use the Luger PO629 was a question no one could answer.

Still, Mark couldn't stop thinking that the offender might be much closer to home than investigators initially thought.

And turns out, that's exactly what his counterparts in the French police force thought too.

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In February 2014, several months after authorities decided to release the composite sketch of the mysterious motorcycle rider that witnesses had seen in the general vicinity of the crime scene, they got some new information which prompted them to arrest a 48 year old Frenchman.

I know that kind of feels out of the blue and you probably have all the questions because I did too.

But apparently this guy shared a remarkable resemblance to the motorcyclist in the composite sketch.

And when it went out to the public, the police got a few calls about him.

He had a home mere miles from the crime scene, owned a motorcycle, and had a large collection of firearms.

one of which was reported to be an antique Luger pistol.

When detectives looked into his cell phone records for September 5th, 2012, things began looking even worse for this suspect.

The records showed that he'd been in the general area of the crime scene on the day the Alhilles and Sylvan were murdered.

Shortly before the shootings, he'd left his job as a municipal police officer in a small French village.

And even though the source material doesn't outright say this, I think law enforcement's assumption was that the circumstances in which he departed his prior job were not ideal and had affected him possibly to the point where he'd lashed out in violence.

John Litchfield reported for The Independent that while working as a police officer, this suspect had been accused a few times of acting violently toward foreign tourists, both verbally and physically, as well as making racist remarks.

And because the Alhilles were visiting from England when they were killed, this detail was probably something investigators made note of when evaluating him as a potential suspect.

Eager to learn as much as they could about this suspect, investigators searched three houses associated with him and even used metal detectors in a garden on one of his properties.

But they didn't find anything that connected him directly to the crime.

There was no murder weapon, no forensic evidence, no clothing, nothing.

When detectives took a closer look at his motorbike and helmet, they discovered that neither were a match for the style of bike and helmet that witnesses near Lake Annecy had seen the mysterious motorcyclist wearing on the day of the crime.

This guy's Luger pistol also ended up not being the same as the murder weapon.

So after a day or so of being questioned and scrutinized by police, he was released and no formal charges were ever filed against him.

Interviewees who spoke to producers for the docuseries Murder in the Alps said that because this man's real name was briefly associated with the case, it pretty much destroyed his life.

And I can absolutely see why.

I mean, stories about this crime were everywhere.

Being accused of committing such a horrible thing, even if for like a day or two, would certainly change a lot about a person's life.

That's one of the reasons I'm choosing not to say his name, because it's just not appropriate to keep perpetuating the toll this has taken on his life.

The next interesting twist in the case came in June 2014, one year and nine months after the murders.

Peter Allen reported for the Evening Standard that a 50-year-old man who knew Sylvain Molier had been found shot dead in his home.

According to the news coverage, this guy was a former French soldier and trained marksman who police had questioned several months into their investigation, but never arrested.

When authorities discovered this man's body, they also found evidence that indicated some sort of violent disturbance had gone down in his apartment.

And he'd left a six or seven page note explaining how disturbed he'd been by the police's questioning in the Lake Annecy case because it had made him feel like a suspect.

Other than that one article by the Evening Standard, though, I didn't find any other reporting about this ex-soldier's death, the police's investigation into what happened to him, or anything more than his connection to Sylvain, other than he somehow knew Sylvain's family.

According to another article by the Evening Standard, on the two-year anniversary of the crime in September 2014, French prosecutor Eric Mayode told reporters that additional forensic testing had been done on evidence in the case, as well as a review of thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews.

But no avenues of the investigation seemed particularly promising.

He remarked, quote, the further we advance, the less conviction we have.

It lacks the element of a witness which allows everything to be opened up.

We have tried everything possible, but perhaps we're in the presence of the perfect crime, end quote.

He communicated in clear terms that it could take years to get to the bottom of what really happened.

A few months later, in May 2015, British investigator Mark Preston and his team did what he described as a full review of the case to see if there were any leads they could rule out.

At that point, the murders were still unsolved and not much progress had been made.

During this review, Mark was finally able to dismiss the theory that Saad's job in the satellite technology industry was somehow linked to the crime.

Turns out, his employer had revealed that nothing Saad worked on was earth-shattering or allowed him access to sensitive information.

He'd mostly been a design engineer for basic technology put into commercial aircrafts, not components of nuclear warheads or anything espionage-esque like that.

Something else interesting Mark's team uncovered while doing their case review was that the Alhilles' passports, you know, the ones that everyone had been told all along had just vanished.

Well, they were actually safe and sound in custody at a forensics lab that was utilized by the French police.

Mark Preston told producers for Murder in the Alps that the family's passports had actually been in France all along since day one, the entire time.

They were discovered in Saad's jacket pocket, which had been removed from his body during his autopsy.

In response to this revelation, French prosecutor Eric Mayode said that such an oversight was due to what he described as clumsiness by the initial investigators.

But I need to pause on this for a second because if you look at all the early statements Eric Mayode made during his many press conferences, it's very clear that the French emphasized the missing passports were kind of like proof that a lone professional killer had carried out these murders.

Basically, the assumption was that the shooter had intentionally taken the family's passports as some sort of trophy or receipt that he'd eliminated the correct targets.

But at least some people on the French investigative team knew that the passports had never been taken.

I guess there's a world in which that information just wasn't communicated to Eric Mayotte or whatever, but still, like, it's so strange to me that this narrative about the passports being missing endured for as long as it did, when like, in the end, it was completely unfounded.

Anyway, when all this was said and done and Mark Preston's team from Britain wrapped up its review of the case, he wrote up a long report to the French that concluded investigators from both countries had been looking in the wrong direction for nearly three years.

He emphasized that French police should 100% look more into Sylvain Molier's life because Mark felt in his gut that the cyclist was the key to the whole thing.

He believed that the Alhilli family was collateral damage in an assassination plot against Sylvain that had gone completely off the rails.

He told journalist and author Tom Pari, quote, My view is that it was to cover and confuse any investigation that Molier was the target.

That's why the gunmen used so many bullets.

Whoever was in that car park was going to die.

He later continued, I do think that the depth to which we delved into the Alhilles got to the point where we could absolutely prove that they were not the targets.

With Mollier, there were still questions.

End quote.

However, Mark's recommendation that the cyclists be investigated more was apparently ignored by Eric Mayode and the rest of France's investigative team.

By that point, point, the amount of French personnel assigned to work the case had been scaled back from roughly 80 investigators to just 20.

But in December 2015, more than three years after the murders, John Litchfield reported for The Independent that French authorities had launched an international search for roughly 56,000 Luger P0629 pistols.

Eric Mayode told the press that even though the task of trying to track down each one of those guns and compare it to ballistics from the crime scene was going to be massive, they had to try.

French officials also announced that advances in forensic testing had revealed two unidentified DNA profiles on the Alhilles BMW.

One of those profiles had come from the vehicle's front bumper, and the other was found beneath the driver's seat floor mat where Saad had been sitting.

Neither of the DNA profiles belonged to the victims or anyone in the European criminal database at the time.

At LastCheck, investigators are still working to determine who they belong to.

In 2016, Eric Mayode stepped down as Annecy's prosecutor, and three years later, in 2019, Mark Preston retired from the Surrey Police Force.

By 2017, French authorities had to admit publicly that they didn't have a working theory on the case, even after five years of looking at it from so many different angles.

Fast forward to 2020, though, and news publications reported that British authorities intended to re-interview Zainab and Zina to try and figure out if there were any details from the day of the crime that the girls remembered, but had been unable to recall back in 2012, 2013, or closer to the time of the killings.

In 2020, Zaynab would have been a teenager and Zina was, I think, 12 years old, if my math is right.

An article by Le Parisienne reported it took until June 2021 for British police to actually interview Zaynab, though.

At that point in time, she was 16 years old.

Much of her memory of the day her family was attacked was the same as it had always been, but I guess now that she was older, she could recall some details with a bit more clarity.

She told investigators that she remembered her and her father got out of their car and almost right away she saw a cyclist stopped on his bike, who we know is Sylvain.

But then just as everyone else in her family was about to exit their car, gunshots rang out.

She said that her dad, Saad, and Mom Iqbal hollered for her to get back into the car immediately, but she didn't have time

The next thing she remembered was being grabbed from behind by a fair-skinned man, and she knew what race he was because at that point in time, his hands were bare, meaning he obviously wasn't wearing gloves when he attacked her.

The only other major detail Zainab could recall was that the assailant wore a leather jacket and pants.

Another small glimmer of hope came in 2021 when authorities looked into alleged connections between a documented group of hired contract killers who had ties to Lake Annecy.

This hit squad, as it was dubbed, was comprised of former and active French intelligence agents, some of whom had been arrested for unrelated crimes and confessed to assaulting or spying on specific targets as part of their contract killing work.

No one in this group mentioned the Alhilles or Sylvan by name, but Authorities definitely speculated that members of the squad could have been behind their deaths, mostly because ammunition that was compatible with a Luger 20629 pistol had been found at one of the hit squad members' houses.

In January 2022, a 58-year-old motorcyclist who the source material only refers to as Pierre C was taken into custody and questioned about the crime, but he was later released due to lack of evidence.

Apparently, Pierre had actually been taken into custody once before, like way back in 2015, because it was determined that he was the motorcyclist who police have been trying to identify from their composite sketch.

But turns out, he'd gone hang gliding and then gotten lost in the French Alps while riding his motorcycle on the day of the crime and seemingly had nothing to do with the murders.

A few months later, in June 2022, as the 10-year anniversary of the crime was nearing, Channel 4's docus series Murder in the Alps aired, which is a piece of source material I've referred to a lot throughout this episode and part one.

The series was the first time Zaid, Saad's older brother, had taken the opportunity opportunity to publicly give his side of the story in a vulnerable and raw way.

And audiences really got what I think is the most comprehensive understanding of the details of the case from his perspective and really all sides.

He used the docuseries to dispel once and for all any suspicions that he was involved in the crime.

He emphasized that he believes the shooter's target was Sylvain Molier, not Saad, not Iqbal, or anyone else.

He also accused the French police of of a cover-up.

He told Radio Times reporter Catherine Knight, quote, I think they knew from day one what happened and they have hidden it.

The whole thing was a deception.

It means it's very difficult to move on sometimes.

I still live it every day and my brother is with me every day, end quote.

Around that same time, so summer 2022, French publication La Parisienne released a series of articles that recapped the various facts of the case and reported that the Annecy Prosecutor's Office had officially requested the case be sent to a newly created cold case branch for serial and unexplained crimes.

By May 2024, French investigators had sent off a few cigarette butts found at the crime scene, Sylvan's clothing, shoes, and bike helmet, and Zaynab's clothing and shoes to undergo DNA analysis.

Authorities also resubmitted the piece of grip from the murder weapon, which had previously only indicated Zaynab's DNA was present.

Police were hopeful that more sensitive testing methods would deliver new results.

La Parisienne's coverage in May 2024 explained that new ballistics testing that occurred in December 2023 on similar models of the likely murder weapon confirmed that the gun used to carry out the killings was one from a series of 940 that were manufactured in 1935 in Switzerland.

Some of the more recent updates about this case that came out in October 2024 stated that authorities were planning to conduct a full-scale reconstruction of the crime scene at a military base near Paris.

Why they didn't want to do this exercise back at the original crime scene, I don't know.

But according to coverage by ITV News, several people who'd previously worked on the case were ordered to show up and take part in this reconstruction.

I have to imagine that group included people like former French prosecutor Eric Mayod, as well as retired British investigator Mark Preston, but I'm not sure.

Coverage by La Parisienne from February 2025 explained that the reconstruction in Paris consisted of sending three shooters with varying degrees of shooting experience through a situation that simulated the crime scene.

Each shooter was timed, and the big takeaway for investigators was that whoever the killer was, he was skilled in handling firearms, and he'd most likely stayed composed during the attack.

Some experts agree with that conclusion, while others don't.

According to the coverage, the most recent avenue of investigation has led authorities to take a keen look at a former soldier, but who that is, where he's from, anything about him is not information that's been publicly released.

The Daily Observer announced in early May 2025 that a six-part limited series based on this case is going to be produced in 2026.

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch is expected to executive produce the show, and a representative for the team behind the project stated it it was really only because of the recent renewed interest and developments in the case that prompted the series to come to fruition.

As of this recording, the murders of Saad and Iqbal Al-Hili, Iqbal's mother, Zahela, and Sylvain Molier are still unsolved.

Like I told you at the beginning of part one, this case is the kind that sparks more questions than answers.

Because while there seem to be plenty of theories and potential leads, what happened out there in the woods near Lake Annecy remains a mystery for now.

Park Predators is an audio Chuck production.

You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com.

And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram at ParkPredators.

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