It has been almost a decade since the bullet-stricken bodies of a British-Iraqi family and a French cyclist were found on a deserted road in the French Alps on 5 September 2012. Saad Al-Hilli, 50, his wife, Iqbal, 47, and her mother, Suhaila Al-Allaf, 74, were found dead in their empty, 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 a gunshot wound to her shoulder and her 4-year-old sister Zeena hid under the body of her mother in the back seat.
More than 800 witnesses in France, England, Italy, Switzerland and Iraq have been heard in the dead-end investigation, which is embroiled in conspiracy theories, ranging from reports that patriarch Saad Al-Hilli was a money-runner for Saddam Hussein rumors of secret bank accounts and a family dispute, the assumptions that it was an ambush of a secret meeting between Mollier and Al-Hilli. In 2013, Al-Hilli’s older brother is accused of ordering a hit on his brother, but was later released due to lack of evidence of any assassins.
Blood splatter evidence unraveled an unsolvable mystery. The Al-Hilli patriarch was shot dead inside the locked car, but the cyclist’s blood was on his clothes. The 7-year-old found outside the vehicle had the cyclist’s blood on her feet.
The case, although still open, has been idle for years.
But this week, a bizarre connection to the attempted assassination of French hypnotist Marie-Hélène Dini (55) near Paris may just help solve the case. Dini understands that she avoided an assassination by a hit team of the French police last year, was hired for about $ 85,000, according to her professional competitor. The rival, who was also arrested, said he only hired the men to watch her and not kill her.
Police were called to Dini’s home in the suburb of Creteil in Paris last year when a curious neighbor called in two suspicious men to evacuate the neighborhood. Police found the men, who were wearing black clothes and gloves, with a Luger Po6 pistol and silencer sitting in a car with fake license plates. They told police they were on an “official mission” to shoot the hypnotist because of her alleged dealings with the secret Israeli police, known as the Mossad.
Police detained the couple and found them to be paid assassins linked to other murders they hire. According to them, the men, one of whom was a retired police officer, were gathered by a ‘small group of Freemasons who turned their hands to carry out traction contracts’, according to reports in the French media. Dini told police she had no connection to the Mossad and has since left the Paris area.
Their weapons and ammunition were then analyzed to try to find a connection with unsolved crimes. Two other murders have already been linked to the hit group, and French police reported on Friday that the exact type of bullets in their loaded rifle intended for the hynotis were used to kill the Al-Hilli family and the French motorcyclist in the Alps. to make. Investigators are now investigating who the men may have appointed and whether Al-Hilli or the French cyclist – or both – were the intended targets, and why.