Girl injured in Alps murders back in UK

The seven-year-old girl seriously injured in the Alps shooting attack that killed her parents, grandmother and a French cyclist, returned to Britain yesterday. BFM TV quoted French police as saying Zainab al-Hilli had left a hospital in the southeastern city of Toulouse and returned to Britain. Police sources said Zainab was being questioned as a witness to the murders of her father Saad al-Hilli, mother Iqbal, grandmother and a passing cyclist in a forest car park near Lake Annecy last week. The al-Hilli family members were found shot dead in their car on September 5. Local man Sylvain Mollier, 45, was also found dead at the scene. Zainab and her four-year-old sister Zeena were the only survivors of the shootings. Zeena has already returned to Britain. Zainab was left for dead after being shot in the shoulder and severely beaten around the head. Last Sunday, she woke from a medically-induced coma in a Toulouse hospital, where she was being treated for a fractured skull. Zeena, who escaped the attack unharmed by hiding behind a seat in the car, did not see the killer or killers. She returned home last Sunday with relatives. The family were on a camping holiday in France, when they targeted in what appears to have been a professional killing. Public prosecutor Eric Maillaud has listed three main lines of investigation: Saad al-Hilli’s engineering work, the reported dispute between him and his brother over an inheritance and his Iraqi origins. Meanwhile, British police have hailed “extremely productive” talks with the French prosecutor and the judge leading the probe into the killing. Surrey Police said in a statement that they had met with French prosecutor Eric Maillaud, who is in charge of the investigation, along with judge Michel Mollin, members of the French paramilitary police and of the Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service. The statement said that “progress had been made in relation to a number of issues arising from the challenges and complexities of an enquiry across two judicial processes. “The meeting built on the already established strong working relationships between all parties involved,” the statement added. It said that the meeting had been “extremely productive”. Maillaud said earlier, after arriving in Surrey, southeast England where the Hilli family lived, that the cause of the killings lay in Britain. “We are perfectly aware that Annecy is just the chance location of this drama and that it seems that the origin, the causes and the explanation are here,” he told journalists in the town of Woking in Surrey. Meanwhile Swedish legal documents obtained by AFP in Stockholm said Suhaila al-Allaf, the mother of Iqbal al-Hilli and the oldest victim of the shooting, had for years suffered from beatings at the hands of her mentally unstable son. Haydar Thaher, 46, had repeatedly “insulted, threatened and beaten his parents over a very long time”, said one document. Police had been called out to their home in the southern suburbs of Stockholm eight times between 2001 and 2007. Thaher still lived at home because of mental health problems, the documents added. But a source close to the French-led inquiry into the shootings told AFP on Thursday that “it was not worth focusing” on this new Swedish angle. “It’s not relevant,” he said. On Thursday, the British man who discovered the victims of the shootings gave his first television interview saying the scene had resembled the set of a TV crime show. “It was pretty much what you would imagine a set from (TV crime series) ‘CSI Miami’ would be like,” Brett Martin told the BBC. “There was a lot of blood and heads with bullet holes in them.” He said one of the family’s daughters, seven-year-old Zainab, was “prone on the road, moaning, sort of semi-conscious” when he stumbled across the scene in a forest area in Annecy. Martin, a former member of Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF), said he came across the tragic scene after he had set out for a bicycle ride in the French Alps at about 2:30pm. As he climbed a hill near Chevaline, he was confronted with the bloodbath, first spotting a French cyclist who had been shot dead. “It was the sort of thing you would never in your life expect to come across,” he said. “As I approached the scene, the first thing I saw was a bike on its side. I had seen the cyclist ahead of me much earlier so I thought he was just having a rest. “As I got a little bit closer, a very young child stumbled out onto the road and at first I thought she was actually just playing with her sibling because she sort of looked, from a distance, as if she was falling over, larking about like a child would. “However, as I approached her it was obvious that she was quite badly injured and there was a lot of blood on her.