The first person on the scene of a quadruple murder in a quiet wooded area of the French Alps has described it as something from a Hollywood movie, with bullet- ridden bodies in a car whose engine was still running and blood everywhere.
Former British air force pilot Brett Martin had been out for a cycle ride last Wednesday when he came across another cyclist and three members of a holidaying British family who had been shot dead on a remote mountain road in the Annecy lake area.
“It seemed to me just like a Hollywood scene, and if someone had said ‘cut’ and everybody got up and walked away, that would have been it,” Martin said in an interview with BBC TV yesterday, “but unfortunately it was real life.”
The victims in the BMW car were Saad al-Hilli, an Iraqi- born engineer, his wife and his mother-in-law.
“There was a lot of blood and heads with bullet holes in them,” Martin said. “It’s the sort of thing you would never in your life expect to come across.”
The first thing he said he saw as he approached was a bike on its side and a child, Hilli’s seven- year-old daughter Zainab, who had stumbled out into the road.
As he got closer, he realised she had serious head injuries and was covered in blood.
“She was prone on the road, moaning, semi-conscious and she was lying in a position that was in front of this car with its wheels spinning,” Martin added. “She was very severely injured because she was in and out of consciousness.”
He moved her out of the path of the car before turning to the cyclist, before quickly deducing he was dead.
– (Reuters)