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8,072 thoughts on “Not Forgetting the al-Hillis continued

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  • James

    “Am I the only one to feel that Saad had become slightly unhinged in the run-up to the murders?”

    SAH does seem to have become “slightly unhinged” indeed.
    Even paranoid. Maybe with reason. Maybe without reason.
    For example, I don’t know many people (if any) who own a taser gun.

    That was obviously kept for “security”. But from what threat ? The answer to that has never been “suggested” by ZAH (if he knew) or the British police.

    ZAH admits that there was a “disagreement” between them which centred around the inheritance of various “items” that had been controlled by their father. This had turned violent in the past.

    ZAH had been the “accountant” in the family and responsible for their father’s “accounts”. And thus far, we don’t know where the money (deposit or fully paid) came from to acquire the flat that ZAH lives in now (it is believed he was “helped” by his father) or the apartment in Espana (which it appears there was an attempt for that to be transferred into the name of ZAH).

    Which ever way you cut it, there were two brothers and a disputed Will. Now there’s only one brother. Noting was agreed before… so nothing had been settled. I imagine the Estate of SAH owns half of that. Which is “nothing”. Everything is “still owned” by the Estate of the Late KAH.

  • Peter

    @ Good In Parts, 19 Jun, 2015 – 6:36 pm

    I have pondered the hypothesis that the killings were an extended suicide arranged for by Saad. Outlandish as it might appear on a first reading, it does have some things to recommend itself.

    Let’s speculate a bit and assume that Saad had recently found out that Iqbal had been married previously and that she had still kept in touch with her former husband. In conjunction with the falling-out with his brother, something like that might have motivated him to commit extended suicide and/b> at the same time take revenge upon his brother by pinning suspicion firmly upon him. So, how does he go about it? First, he lets all and sundry know that he fears an imminent attack upon life by his own brother, laying it on with a trowel, to the extent of even telling the neighbours, ensuring that there will be plenty of witnesses to testify to that effect. Then, he arranges for an impromptu holiday, with the intention of luring his mother-in-law over from Sweden. The mother-in-law also has to die because she knew about Iqbal’s previous marriage and was complicit in duping him. Having reached his holiday destination, he takes a number of short drives around the area in order to identify a suitable place, finally settling upon the Martinet. At the appointed hour, he drives there …

    And this is where the scenario falls flat, at least in my opinion: Who was supposed to do the dirty deed? How could Saad have found (and paid) a grade-A psycho who conveniently happened to live in that area? Why did Saad attempt to flee if he wanted to die? Why did he not make things easier for the killer by urging his entire family to get out of the car? No, I don’t think that this scenario works.

    The one idea that I consider it worth hanging on to is that Saad might have intended to pin the blame for anything untoward that might happen to him on Zaid. Imagine if Saad had been found shot dead on his doorstep in Claygate. With the kind of groundwork that Saad had laid, including calling the police to a tussle between himself and his brother, Zaid would almost certainly have been charged with instigating his murder, even if the killer had never been found and no connexion between the killer and Zaid ever proven.

  • michael norton

    @ Bacchus

    Christelle MENEGALDO, adjoint administratif 2ème classe au sein du pôle de
    l’événementiel
    , pour le
    décès de son frère,
    Nathalie MOLLIER, adjoint administratif principal 1ère classe au service des finances pour le décès
    de sa belle-mère survenu le 21 juin 2014.

  • James

    @Peter

    “…and that’s where the scenario falls flat on it’s face”.

    as you say, where would SAH find a “grade A nutter” to do the shooting ? But it is worth considering every option.

    One scenario I once considered was also “out there” …and it too fell flat on it’s face in “the detail”.

    The motivation is the same as your, but SAH didn’t want to commit suicide, merely “wipe out” his wife and her mother.

    He was becoming “fearful/unhinged/threatened/paranoid” and this plan came to him.

    But…. same problem as your scenario. Where was he to find such a person to conduct the attack AND how did he become a victim ?The latter may be explained by suggesting the “hired hand” had been paid (even only half, but half of a good figure) and decided to “bite the hand that fed” so that no trace could be found. Dead men don’t talk….and all that.

    The “benefit” in that type of scenario is… the links between the “employer” (who also became a victim) and the “employee” would have been conducted in a “cloak and dagger” fashion from the start.

    The other “elephant in the room” is, why then did SAH try to escape ? He would have foiled his own plan (unless the women were shot in the initial fire….which it seems they weren’t) AND how was he to explain what he was doing at the Martinet ? Was that going to be “just a drive around the area…see, here are the photos”.

  • michael norton

    from The Local

    France’s nuclear calamity has UK worried

    http://www.thelocal.fr/20150421/flamanville-frances-own-nuclear-nightmare

    France’s world renowned prowess in the nuclear industry is being seriously undermined by its efforts to build a flagship nuclear reactor which is fast becoming a costly calamity. The future of the Flamanville 3 project appears to hang in the balance after yet another major setback that has London worried.

    Yes the perfect Socialst FRENCH economy is slipping away.

  • Peter

    @ James

    I cannot lay claim to my foregoing scenario; it was mentioned in Parry’s book (interestingly attributed to an anonymous source). Anyway, I think that your far-out scenario is much, much better. I really cannot imagine Saad arranging for his daughters to be killed, not even in the most extreme distress on his part. However, I could well imagine that, say, after having stumbled across Iqbal’s e-mails to Jim Thompson, he might have wanted to do away with his bigamous wife and stepmother.

    The more I think about it, the more I am in two minds about whether, in the months leading up to the murders, Saad was becoming unhinged or slyly setting up his brother Zaid for a fall (not that a small dose of insanity and craftiness are mutually exclusive). The way in which he communicated feeling his life threatened by Zaid, e. g., calling the cops to a minor physical alteration with Zaid in which he had the upper hand anyway (a point on which I believe Zaid), confessing his darkest secrets to a neighbour over the garden fence shortly before setting off on holiday, his distressed-sounding call to the bank in Geneva, all that sounds like ham acting.

    Now let’s combine those two elements: Iqbal and her mother are shot by a hired killer, Saad heroically manages to save his daughters, escaping with a few cuts and bruises – and Zaid gets a whole-life tariff for having arranged the murders. From Saad’s point of view, this might have – if you will forgive the unfortunate turn of phrase – killed a lot of birds with one stone: no messy separation from Iqbal with the attendant custody battle, sweet revenge upon his brother, having the Claygate house all to himself and the kids …

    Now, how could he have made that work? Iqbal’s previous marriage plus her continuing contact with Thompson, which could easily be construed as long-term infidelity, really constitute classic grounds for an “honour killing”. Add to that a share of the money in the Geneva bank account as an inducement, and it should not have been too difficult for Saad to persuade a distant relative from war-torn Iraq to rid him of his turbulent wife. It is equally easy to see how this plan could have gone badly wrong from the start: the killer winging Zainab – he was not supposed to do that! –, SM appearing on the scene and getting shot – that was not supposed to happen! –, Saad panicking and attempting to flee, the killer also panicking and deciding to kill everyone in sight, including Saad.

    It remains a far-fetched hypothesis, but I think that it can be made to work.

  • Pink

    Its an interesting idea could someone have been blackmailing Iqbal about JT and the trip to Martinet was to pay them off,maybe Saad and Zainab were meant to go for a walk and the watching MB collect the money when the coast was clear or something along those lines .
    One curious thing I saw mentioned was that Zaid knew about Iqbals marriage to JT is that a fact ?
    And was it said that someone deleted the email account between Iqbal and JT?

  • michael norton

    However i can’t see Saad or Zaid arranging to have Jimmy killed with a poison dart in a different continent at the same time?

  • Good In Parts

    Peter Re your 7:38 post

    My thoughts on this scenario are very similar. Parry puts this scenario forward but I feel doesn’t fully examine it. I wondered whether this possibility was hinted to him by the police and he was being used as a messenger. Remember that messengers often get shot.

    You commented “laying it on with a trowel”, my thought was
    “contrived”.

    But in the book, EM is quoted explicitly as saying of SAH, that his fear of his brother was ‘real’. He emphasised this point and I think wanted this view to be included in the book.

    Maybe the medical records of the SAH’s heart attack (ECG’s etc)
    have been reviewed and there is no likelyhood of any of it being faked.

    However EM did not say that Saad’s fear of Zaid was well founded. Indeed, unless there are things being held back, I do not see any unequivocal, sufficiently threatening actions or statements from Zaid.

    So real fear, but of what? My current view is that there may have actually been a real threat, either from elsewhere in the extended family or external to it, that was interpreted by SAH as originating from Zaid.

    Your idea of ‘blame pinning’ as expressed in your final paragraph, is very interesting. So, Saad may have been aware of the true source of any theat but decided that if he did get whacked the blame should fall on Zaid.

  • Peter

    @ Pink
    – The idea that Iqbal was being blackmailed is an interesting variation.
    – Zaid himself dismissed Iqbal’s previous marriage being a secret, claiming that he knew all about it at the time. I am not sure whether I believe him on that one.
    – Parry quotes Judy Weatherly as saying that, months after Jim Thompson’s death, she checked his e-mail account (to which only she had the password) and found all his e-mails erased “from midnight backwards” and the password reset. However, her narrative is slightly garbled. First, she “tried” to check his e-mails on her own initiative (where I take “tried” to imply that she didn’t succeed). Then, much later, the FBI called her and she “checked again and they were all gone.” Thus, it is not entirely clear (to me at least) whether his e-mails had already been gone the first time she checked, or only after the FBI called her. In the latter case, I would assume that it was the FBI or the e-mail provider who deleted them.

    @ Good in Parts
    – Saad could have been in real fear of / under real stress because of something that he himself had initiated, even to the point of requiring medical treatment or at least being able to seek medical treatment without being dismissed as a malingerer (“suspected heart attack symptoms” are not quite the same thing as a genuine heart attack, though. For the former diagnosis, it would suffice to see a GP and complain of sudden, intense, constricting chest pains the night before, pain radiating out into the jaw and arms and lasting for more than five minutes). Anyway, I think that your differentiating between a real fear and a well-founded one is a good approach.
    – Zaid comes across as being far too bright and legally savvy to have overtly threatened his brother. In doing so, he would have done himself a massive disfavour. Thus, the question remains: who or what was Saad afraid of, and did he try to put a spin upon things by saying that he felt threatened by his brother?

  • Good In Parts

    James Peter & Pink

    James, your idea (an alternate to ‘two husbands in one day’) is interesting but even magically sourcing a gun for hire I still couldn’t get it to stack up.

    The question I asked myself was, why have Suhalia killed before monies were signed over to his children?

    Now ‘assisted suicide’ and ‘family destruction’ makes perversely more sense because in that scenario money and property have become meaningless.

    Peter, I too really cannot imagine Saad arranging for his daughters to be killed, not even in the most extreme distress on his part.

    But then I am not barking.

    I guess that in a family destruction scenario, logic and proportion have fallen by the wayside at that stage. Could there be perverse logic in their deaths in that it would be somehow cruel to leave them alive in this world without their mother? Although shamed by their birth out of wedlock, their deaths as innocents giving admission to paradise? Who knows?

    Pink, Yes Zaid apparently did know about Iqbals previous marriage. If there was blackmail, I don’t think it was him though.

    More likely to be those pesky Jordanian hacksters again, after all if they got all of Saad’s on-line accounts they certainly would have gotten Iqbals.

    I suppose it is the perception of the prior marriage thing that determines its importance. If Saad had been told she had had a bogus temporary marriage to get a green card, then years later finds out she has a secret email account with messages indicating some kind of ongoing relationship (and that she had been still married to JT when she married him), then he may have been somewhat peeved.

    Particularly if he only found out when the first blackmail demand arrived.

    • Skeptic

      I assume there’s no question that his daughters were his – DNA tests etc?

      (forgive me for being so far behind – I try to read 2-3 pages a day to catch up after watching the Netflix Doco about it)

  • Bacchus

    I can’t put my new comment, appear always this error message :

    “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!”

    Why ?

  • Bacchus

    I put the message in french

    regardez em bas du lien suivant :

    http://carnet.sudouest.fr/deces/yvette-menegaldo/36922687

    Pourquoi avoir seulement ecrit “patrice” ?

    Il n’existe que 2 Patrice M. en France.
    http://www.yasni.fr/patrice+menegaldo/recherche+personne?teaser=4&sh

    Si c’est notre Patrice, alors on peut en déduire qu’il utilise un ordinateur.
    S’il utilise un ordinateur, c’est qu’il laisse des traces.
    s’il existe des traces, on devrait les trouver sur le web.
    Mais il n’existe rien ! Zero ! ils ont effacé toutes les informations.
    Qui est suffisamment puissant pour effacer toutes les informations sur le web ?

  • Peter

    @ Good in Parts

    The question I asked myself was, why have Suhalia killed before monies were signed over to his children?

    A good question, unless Maillaud was right and she really was “not a rich woman.” In that case, her intended gift to her granddaughters would have seemed like loose change to Saad. Then again, the troubling burglary into her Tumba flat with the attendant theft of documents and a PC suggests that she may not have been as poor as appearances would have suggested. (One of the most enduring images that will stay with me from Parry’s book is Saad receiving the odd handful of cash from his friend Dr Zaid Alabdi in return for doing little DIY jobs, just to keep him ticking over, whilst all the time being aware of a very tidy sum in a Geneva bank account waiting for him.)

  • Peter

    @ Bacchus

    Easy now. First save your intended comment to a text file, then flush your browser cache and history, then restart your browser, finally try again. You still *can* post here, so there is probably some kind of issue with your posting – too many URLs in a single posting, perhaps?

  • Bacchus

    Thank Peter, certainly many URL.

    Take a look of the end of this link
    http://carnet.sudouest.fr/deces/yvette-menegaldo/36922687

    In france there are only 2 Patrice M…. (yasni)

    Who is this Patrice ?

    If he has pute this message (“bougie”), we can deduce that he used a computer.
    If he used a computer, we can deduce that he was tracable.
    If he was tracable, we can deduce there should be informations about him.
    But there have nothing, zero. The informations have been cleaned.
    What power can clean the entire web?

  • Peter

    @ Bacchus

    Nice find! If we assume that Patrice Menegaldo mainly or exclusively used French websites, my assumption would be that Maillaud & Cie made those delete any relevant information. I have mentioned before that I was puzzled why, if Menegaldo had been a genuine ex-Legionnaire, the local amicale did not send condolences. That, too, would have been within M Le Procureur’s powers to achieve.

    Then again, I have had the only real ex-Legionnaire whom I know enquire about Menegaldo, a Polish guy who looks as if he could wrestle grizzly bears for fun, but who still breaks into tears talking about his time there. Perhaps they fobbed him off, or perhaps Menegaldo was only a cook or bottle-washer there.

  • Pink

    @Peter Would the FBI have any reason to delete emails JT is supposed to have died of heart attack ?
    I can’t see why a hacker would either come to that.
    I think we are all pretty well agreed SAH was stressed and possibly a little paranoid I have leaned towards it not being unreasonable given the circumstances ,falling out with his brother ,worries about the house, people hacking his accounts,a bad back , between jobs etc .
    Assuming the contact with JT is innocent he could have been a friend to talk too for Iqbal especially if SAH was preoccupied with his troubles .
    I am not going anywhere with this I cannot see why it would get them killed just considering the possibility that JT was passing information on .

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