French police believe two men who were shot dead and dumped near the southern town of Perpignan last November may have been an Irish father and son.
Gardaí have been asked to assist in identifying the bodies which were found on November 25th, when a local farmer and a hunter separately found the corpses wrapped in oriental rugs, 3km apart, near the villages of Millas and Corneilla-la-Rivière.
Both had been shot in the head, but local police say the murder scene has not 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 two 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 bitumeurs irlandais," the officer 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 a mix so thin 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 quickly ruled out.
Investigating officers believe the bodies were brought to the patch of wasteland and the field where they were found near Millas, 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, the officer 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."