French police arrested a man, whose name has not been disclosed, on Wednesday at the request of a judge investigating a mass murder that shook Britain, France, and Iraq nine years ago. Reports from "Al-Arabiya.net" at the time highlighted that three members of an Iraqi family were killed by an automatic weapon used by an unknown assailant, who fled in broad daylight without leaving any indication as to why he targeted the family residing near London, who were on a 10-day holiday at a campsite near the village of Chevaline on the French side of the Alps.
French television channel BFM reported that the arrested individual had previously been questioned by police as a witness, and that officers searched his home yesterday. The public prosecutor's office in the Annecy region, where the crime took place overlooking a lake, stated that the police were attempting to verify whether he might be involved in the crime that led to the deaths of most members of the Iraqi-British family on September 5, 2012. The victims included Saad Al-Hili (50), his wife Iqbal (47), her mother Suhaila Al-Alaf (74), and a passing French cyclist named Sylvain Mollier, who was shot dead at the age of 45 after witnessing the incident, leading the killer to shoot him dead shortly thereafter.
The assailant used a Luger PO6 pistol, caliber 7.65mm, with reports indicating that it was a German-made firearm that served in the Swiss army between 1909 and 1947. The killer fired 25 shots at his victims. The arrested man might be Daniel B, who was previously arrested in March after shooting a French woman working in the field of psychology near Paris. When his home was searched, bullets were found that matched those discovered at the scene of the "Alps massacre," originating from a semi-automatic pistol similar to the one used in the family resort attack.
Saad Al-Hili, an aerospace engineer who had been living in Britain for 11 years, apparently planned to take a trip with his family in his British-registered BMW. His wife, a dentist, their youngest daughter Zainah, and her grandmother occupied the back seat, while he sat at the wheel alongside their other daughter Zainab, aged 7 at the time.
One potential scenario suggests that the assailant was initially targeting the cyclist Mollier, not the Iraqi family. When the cyclist was shot on the mountain road, Al-Hili and his family witnessed the incident. In a panic, he turned the car around to return to the campsite, but the assailant stopped him, demanded he pull over at gunpoint, and when he complied, shot him twice in the forehead, then shot Zainab in the shoulder as she fled the car, terrified. The three victims, Al-Hili, his wife Iqbal, and her mother, were subsequently found dead in the vehicle, with shots fired at both Iqbal and her mother's foreheads and chests.
Another different scenario outlines that Saad Al-Hili might have stopped at a lookout point near the lake to take photos. However, the assailant appeared suddenly, approaching before anyone could exit the vehicle, shooting Al-Hili, his wife, and her mother in the back seat. Young Zainah, aged four at the time, hid under her mother’s body for eight hours, undetected by police who received orders not to open the vehicle doors to preserve the crime scene, according to Eric Maillaud, the prosecutor in Annecy at that time.
Eventually, a passing cyclist found Zainab laying by the roadside and contacted the police, who subsequently discovered the bodies of his wife and mother-in-law inside the car. They also found Iraqi and Swedish passports in the mother's handbag, revealing that her mother, who lived in Sweden, had come to Britain to visit her daughter but instead met the tragic fate of her son-in-law and daughter.
