Ayoon Wa Azan (Who Killed the al-Hilli Family?)

Who killed the al-Hilli family? Why was the al-Hilli family murdered? Was the Mossad involved in the crime? On the 5th of September, 2012, an unknown assailant shot the family while in a BMW car near Lake Annecy in the Alps, killing the father Saad, a 50 year old mechanical engineer, his wife Ikbal (47 years old), and his mother in law Suhaila (74 years old). His young daughter Zainab (7 years) was shot in the shoulder, and hit in her face with the butt of a pistol, and his other young daughter Zeena (4 years) also survived, after she hid under her mother's dress in the car. A French cyclist named Sylvain Mollier, who was nearby, was also killed. The killer used a Luger, an old German pistol model, which uses clips that hold eight bullets each. He fired 25 bullets, which means that he had to change the clip at least three times. Mollier was hit by seven bullets, and the father, mother and mother-in-law received three bullets each, with Zainab taking one bullet. I had followed the news about this crime at the time. I moved on after I found that none of my Iraqi friends in London knew the victim's family, an Iraqi Shiite family that had immigrated to London in the late 1970s to flee Saddam Hussein, and went on to live in Surrey County, south of London. However, I noticed a few weeks later that hardly a day went by without some news about the crime being published in various media outlets, so I decided to put together a dossier about the case which I returned to during the Western holiday leave. Is it a coincidence that Saad al-Hilli worked for a firm in Surrey active in the field of nuclear energy, and that the French cyclist was working in a local company near the scene of the crime also in the domain of nuclear energy? On the 23rd of December, 2012, the Sunday Telegraph published a long investigation about the crime titled “The truth about the 'feud' and the Alps murder family." The feud in question was a reference to a dispute over inheritance between Saad al-Hilli and his brother Zaid. The investigation also pointed out the possibility of the Mossad having carried out the assassination, because of the nature of the work of Saad al-Hilli, who hated Israel, supported Hezbollah and Iran, and published his views on the internet. However, this news was not new. On October 18, 2012, the Daily Mail ran with a story titled “Was Mossad behind the Alps murders?" I read about the possible motives for the crime. I have all the material in keeping, and the motives included: - The Iraqi-British family was killed because it witnessed the assassination of the French Mollier. - Mollier was killed because he witnessed the assassination of the al-Hilli family. - The family was killed because of a dispute between the brothers Saad and Zaid over their inheritance. - It was an ordinary robbery or an attempted kidnapping. - The killer was a psychopath. - Saad and Mollier were partners in an attempt to smuggle nuclear materials to Iran. - There is a large bank account belonging to the al-Hilli family in Geneva, only 50 minutes from the crime scene. - The Alps victims were tied to funds worth 15 million pounds from the oil-for-food program. This column is not large enough for the material available on this case, and it seems that each news story advances a new theory about the crime only for another story to prove it wrong. Even the inheritance issue that received wide coverage was discounted later, and I read that the figures involved were exaggerated. The influential magazine the Sunday Times made the crime in the Alps its cover story, with eight full pages and pictures inside. The French investigator Eric Maillaud, who is working in coordination with Surrey Police, said he believed it could be ten years before the real reasons for the killing of the al-Hilli family emerge. If the investigators do not know, then I will not pretend to know – although I do not rule out the possibility of the Mossad being tied to the crime. Indeed, the Israeli intelligence has killed children along with adults throughout the history of crime which it represents. All I say is that if the murder of the al-Hilli family was only the plot of a movie, then the critics would have said that it contained exaggerations, complications and coincidences that would not occur in real life. But that's what happened. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.