It has been almost a decade since the bodies hit by bullets of a British-Iraqi family and a French cyclist were found on a deserted road in the French Alps on September 5, 2012. Saad Al-Hilli, 50, his wife, Iqbal, 47, and his mother, Suhaila Al-Allaf, 74, were found dead in his burgundy BMW. The lifeless body of Sylvain Mollier, 45, a French cyclist, was near the car. Zainab, the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, was found outside the car, with the pistol shot in the shoulder and her 4-year-old sister, Zeena, was hidden under her mother’s body in the back seat.
More than 800 witnesses in France, England, Italy, Switzerland and Iraq were heard in the dead-end investigation, which has been fraught with conspiracy theories, ranging from reports that patriarch Saad Al-Hilli was a money broker for Saddam Hussein millions thanks to rumors of secret bank accounts and a family feud, assumptions that it was an ambush of a secret meeting between Mollier and Al-Hilli. In 2013, Al-Hilli’s older brother was accused of ordering a murder of his brother, but was later released due to the lack of evidence of any murderer.
Evidence of blood spatter painted an unsolvable mystery. Al-Hilli’s patriarch was shot dead inside the locked car, but he had the cyclist’s blood on his clothes. The 7-year-old girl found outside the vehicle had the cyclist’s blood on her feet.
The case, while still open, has been idle for years.
But this week, a bizarre connection to the assassination attempt of French hypnotist Marie-Hélène Dini, 55, near Paris, may help solve the case. Dini learned that last year she narrowly escaped murder by a murder squad 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 watch her, not to kill her.
Police were called to Dini’s home in the Parisian suburb of Creteil last July, when a nosy neighbor warned 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, sitting in a car with fake license plates. They told the police that they were on “an official mission” to shoot the hypnotist because of their alleged negotiations with the Israeli secret police known as Mossad.
The police arrested the two and discovered that they were paid murderers, linked to other rental murders. They say the men, one of whom was a retired policeman, met through a “small group of Freemasons who started to fulfill successful contracts”, according to French media reports. Dini told police that he had no connection with the Mossad and has since left the Paris area.
His weapon and ammunition were then analyzed to try to find a connection to unsolved crimes. Two other murders have already been linked to the murder squad and French police reported on Friday that the exact type of bullet in their loaded weapon intended for the hypnotist was used to kill the Al-Hilli family and the French biker in the Alps. Investigators are now investigating who may have hired the men and whether Al-Hilli or the French cyclist – or both – were the intended targets and why.