A suspect who was questioned over the unsolved murders of three British family members and a French cyclist in the Alps nine years ago has been released without charge.
The man was freed on Thursday afternoon, Annecy prosecutor Line Bonnet tweeted.
“The explanations given and the verifications carried out made it possible to rule out their potential participation in the events,” Ms Bonnet said.
She said “investigations are continuing to identify the perpetrator(s)”.
No charges have been filed in the case after nine years of investigation.
The former suspect, who was rearrested on Wednesday morning, was the same motorcyclist who was interrogated over the killings in 2015, French media reported.
At the time, he was arrested after police circulated a sketch of a biker seen near the crime scene, but investigators found no evidence to implicate him then either.
Saad Al Hilli, 50, his wife, Ikbal, 47, and her mother Suhaila Al Allaf, 74, were shot dead on a road near Annecy in eastern France on September 5, 2012.
Their two young daughters survived the horror, but cyclist Sylvain Mollier, 45, was also killed.
After his rearrest, the motorcyclist’s custody was extended by prosecutors late on Wednesday as they worked to “verify the timeline”, Ms Bonnet said.
His defence lawyer, Jean-Christophe Basson-Larbi, was quoted by French broadcaster BFMTV as saying that the renewed questioning was down to a “judicial error” and that his client was living through a “nightmare”.
A photofit of a motorcyclist in a distinctive helmet seen near the crime scene was issued by police in 2013.
He was arrested two years later, but was released after claiming he had been paragliding in the area.
He said he had not come forward earlier, despite the wide circulation of the sketch, because he had not seen anything and did not think his evidence would be useful, BFMTV reported.
“The gentleman’s position has always been the same: ‘I was walking … but never crossed paths with this poor family’,” Mr Basson-Larbi said of his client, a businessman, 57, living in Lyon.
The bodies of Iraqi-born engineer Mr Al Hilli and his dentist wife, who lived in Claygate, Surrey, were discovered along with that of Mrs Al Hilli’s mother in their BMW on a remote forest route.
In a bizarre twist, Mrs Al Hilli’s previous husband, an American dentist named only as James T, died from a heart attack on the same day as the couple, but police said there was no link to the murders.
Suspects previously arrested in connection with the case include an Iraqi prisoner known as Mr S, who was claimed to have said he had been offered “a large sum of money” to kill Iraqis living in the UK.
Mr Al Hilli’s brother, Zaid, was also arrested on suspicion of murder in 2013 but was later told he would face no further action after police found there was insufficient evidence to charge him with a crime.
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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Rating: 4/5
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3. Brazil 11 faults
4. Spain 15 faults
5. Great Britain 17 faults
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7. Italy 26 faults
Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
- 4.5 billion years ago: Mars-sized object smashes into the newly-formed Earth, creating debris that coalesces to form the Moon
- 66 million years ago: 10km-wide asteroid crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out over 70 per cent of living species – including the dinosaurs.
- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
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What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
Report to local authorities
Warn others to prevent further harm
Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
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