FRENCH POLICE believe a father and son who were shot dead and dumped near the southern city of Perpignan last November may have been Irish.
The victims’ bodies were found on November 25th, when a local farmer and a hunter separately found a corpse wrapped in an oriental rug, 3km apart, near the towns of Millas and Corneilla-la-Rivière. Both had been shot in the head in what local police suspect was a “settling of scores”, but the murder scene has not yet been identified.
DNA tests confirmed the men were father and son, but despite an extensive investigation involving Interpol and a dedicated unit based in Montpellier, police have been unable to confirm the victims’ identities.
The father is described as between 50 and 60 years old, balding and about 1.71m in height, while the son was 35-40 years, 1.79m tall, with red hair that appeared to have been dyed chestnut brown.
French officers contacted gardaí in recent days after a staff member at a local camp site suggested the men may have stayed there last summer.
"An individual who works on a camp site believes that in June 2010, she received 50 Irish people who belonged to a group of Irish bitumeurs," Staff Sgt François Recouly of Montpellier gendermerie, who is leading the investigation, told The Irish Times. "She thinks she recognises the father and son as having been part of that group of 50 people." Bitumeurs is a term given to groups of travelling scammers who offer to re-lay the Tarmac on private driveways but produce such a thin mix that it quickly deteriorates.
Police initially believed the father and son – known to police as X and Y for the past five months – may have been French, but no matches could be found in the national missing persons database.
The men’s clothes appear to have originated in Germany, but inquiries there yielded no leads, while a link to the case of two men who disappeared in Sicily in 2007 was ruled out.
The bodies were found wrapped in rugs which had been placed in black plastic bags and fastened with masking tape. One was found in a field and the other on a patch of wasteland less than 3km away.
Investigating officers believe the bodies were brought to these locations, but have not yet identified the scene of the killings. Millas is a small town of almost 4,000 inhabitants not far from the Spanish border.
Asked if police suspect the men may have been based around Millas for some time, Mr Recouly said: “No. I think they were simply dumped [there]… We’re not even in a position to say whether they were killed in France or abroad. We have been working constantly with Interpol and Europol but so far the DNA and fingerprint searches have not turned up anything.”
Officers have produced images of the victims’ reconstructed faces and passed them on to gardaí to seek a match. They have also given their Irish counterparts details of the older man’s unusual dental bridge – two of his teeth were made of a gold alloy.