It has been nearly a decade since September 5, 2012, when the bullet-ridden bodies of a British-Iraqi family and a French cyclist were found on a deserted road in the French Alps. Saad Al-Hilli, 50, his wife, Iqbal, 47, and her mother, Suhaila Al-Allaf, 74, were found dead in their burgundy BMW idling. The lifeless body of Sylvain Mollier, 45, a French cyclist, was located near the car. Zainab, the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, was found outside the car, hit with a gun with a gunshot to her shoulder, and her 4-year-old sister Zeena hid 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 was rife with conspiracy theories, ranging from reports that the patriarch, Saad Al-Hilli, was a backer to Saddam Hussein. millions thanks to rumors of secret bank accounts and a family feud, to assumptions that it was an ambush of a secret meeting between Mollier and Al-Hilli. In 2013, Al-Hilli’s older brother was charged with ordering a hit on his brother, but was later released due to lack of evidence of any hit man.
Blood-splattering evidence painted an unsolvable mystery. Al-Hilli’s patriarch was shot in the locked car, but had the cyclist’s blood on his clothing. The 7-year-old found outside the vehicle had the cyclist’s blood on her feet.
The case, while still open, has stood still for years.
But this week, a bizarre connection to the attempted murder of French hypnotist Marie-Hélène Dini, 55, near Paris, could help solve the case. Dini found out that she narrowly escaped a murder by a homicide squad last year that French police said was hired by her professional rival for about $ 85,000. The rival, who was also arrested, said he only hired the men to look after her, not kill her.
Police were called to Dini’s house in the Parisian suburb of Créteil last July when a curious neighbor called that two suspicious-looking men were watching the neighborhood. Police found the men, wearing black clothes and gloves, with a Luger Po6 pistol and silencer in a car with fake number plates. They told police they were on “an official mission” to shoot the hypnotist for her alleged association with the secret Israeli police known as the Mossad.
Police detained the couple and found them to be paid hitmen linked to other contract killings. They say the men, one of whom was a retired police officer, met through a “small group of Masons who had turned their hands in executing hit contracts,” according to French media. Dini told police she had no ties to the Mossad and has since left Paris.
Their weapon and ammunition were then analyzed to try to find a link to unsolved crimes. Two other murders have already been linked to the hit squadron, and French police reported on Friday that the exact type of bullets in their loaded gun intended for the hynotizer was used to kill the Al-Hilli family and the French motorcyclist in the Alps. Now researchers are investigating who hired the men and whether Al-Hilli or the French cyclist – or both – were the intended goals, and why.