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@ GIP
It was reported that someone in the Uk had noticed his car hadn’t moved and went around to the house in Claygate ,that sounded odd to me what use would going around to the house be if the car wasn’t moving in France and how long not moving would cause alarm ?
@ Q
very, very amusing.
@ Pink and Good In Parts
why not welcome reality,
why spout such stuff of little relevance?
My take,
is TWO ISLAMISTS enter the factory gates, smashing gas bottles as they spin, then one of the Islamists jumps from the cab into the back and cuts of the head of their victm, they then dump his body and stick his his on the gates to the factory.
Meanwhile, the factory staff call the Pompiers, they turn up mob-handed, cut down an Islamist, then arrest, the other, then the one that remains alive is taken away with a dozzen police vehicles as convoy.
I would like to imagine that the security services of FRANCE
tell the TRUTH
to their president.
If they do not, the FRENCH are in dire trouble.
In the latest utterings of the president of FRANCE as displayed by the BBC
Francois Hollande is no longer quoted as saying two Islamists attacked the factory,
The other one never existed?
@ M.
You wrote:
“The Molliers/Schutz chose not to engage with the Press immediately”
Comment: not just “immediately”, but in fact “never.” Not only that, but they appear to have the services of a lawyer to suppress all kinds of press coverage about their deceased relative. They are fully entitled to their privacy, of course. But Peter’s argument, which I do not accept, was that because we know so little about them (since they are so private) any hypothesis about them should be dismissed as baseless speculation.
You wrote:
“If they were to condemn Menegaldo publicly they risk a court case, if they defend him they would be accused of knowing who did it, they cannot win”.
Comment: do you mean to imply that you possess some authentic, evidence based, insight into the thinking of the Molliers/Schutz families, or is this speculation on your part? Since you dislike speculation, I assume it is the former, and that you do have some access to some information about them, direct or indirect (probably indirect). Please confirm that this is not mere speculation on your part.
Anyway, the dilemma you attribute to the Molliers/Schutz families regarding whether or not to speak out about Menegaldo would arise only if they believe they have information that is relevant to identifying the killer. Let’s unpack that sentence a bit.
“If they were to condemn Menegaldo publicly they risk a court case…”
They would only consider publicly condemning him if they had some (private) reason to suspect that he was guilty, and would be inhibited from doing so only because they knew that their allegations could not be proved. Otherwise, if they had no such suspicions, the question of whether or not to condemn him publicly would not arise, would it?
“…if they defend him, they would be accused of knowing who did it.”
Why should the simple act of speaking out publicly in support of one man imply such a thing? When Christelle publicly denied her brother’s guilt did anyone accuse her of knowing who did it? If this really is the reason why the Molliers/Schutz families have not publicly defended Menegaldo, it would suggest that they may indeed have some insight into the identity of the real killer, wouldn’t it?
You wrote:
“I have reason to believe Menegaldo worked at a swimming pool where he took care of children … he had never harmed any…”
Comment: I have no reason to doubt this. But do you mean to imply that lifeguards at children’s swimming pools are incapable of violence?
You wrote:
“He was with his nephew on that Wednesday afternoon.”
Comment: If he had a cast iron alibi, why was he placed under GAV by the investigators? Please refer to the relevant definition in Article 62-2 of the French Code of Penal Procedure:
La garde à vue est “une mesure de contrainte décidée par un officier de police judiciaire, sous le contrôle de l’autorité judiciaire, par laquelle une personne à l’encontre de laquelle il existe une ou plusieurs raisons plausibles de qu’elle a commis ou tenté de commettre un crime”.
Or perhaps you consider that, consistent with what Parry writes in his book (entirely quoting Maillaud) he was never placed under GAV and merely went through 45 minute of polite interview.
But the allegation that he was placed under GAV has now come to light as a result of the interview his sister gave to France Bleu. In the broadcast part of the interview, she makes no mention of GAV. But the article by Richard Vivion accompanying the interview, states:
“(La famille Menegaldo) certifie que Patrice a été placé en garde à vue. Un moment qu’il aurait “très mal supporté” selon sa sœur. Dans sa lettre, il lui raconte qu’il a été mal traité et humilié par un gendarme en particulier”.
You wrote:
“Tom Parry was obviously unaware of this factlet (ie the alibi), leading to all sorts of factoids making the headlines”.
Comment: If he was unaware of it, could this have been because Maillaud and the other police sources available to Parry omitted to mention it to him? And if they omitted to mention it, could it be because they attach less credence to it than his sister apparently does? Whilst the Menegaldo family (and you) find it more convenient to concentrate your fire at “le journaliste anglais”, the real issue is whether the treatment of Menegaldo at the hands of the gendarmes was reasonable or unreasonable; and whether his suicide a year later was the direct result of this treatment alone, or whether other factors were involved.
Now that the Menegaldo family have engaged the services of a lawyer (JeanPierre Lepetit) I doubt if we have heard the last of this question.
@ Peter
I see what you are driving at, but I don’t think it is right to equate utterances like “Ouch!” with assumptions about the motivation, movements, relationships, character or background of one or other of the victims of the killings that are made in an attempt to make sense of the known facts. Of course assumptions are different from facts, but it is hoped that a well-constructed hypothesis, based on known facts and on reasonable assumptions and probabilities, will lead us in the right direction.
In your second paragraph, what I think you are saying is that intuition or gut feeling are insufficient. On this I would agree (although there is more to my hypothesis than that), but I would note in passing that intuition and gut feeling are a necessary complement to empirical research and logical analysis. The human mind is not a machine, and if it were, most of the scientific advances in human history would not have occurred.
Anyway, I get your key point, which is that if I am right, others are still not going to be convinced. Of course, no one is under any obligation to accept my hypothesis or indeed any other. Indeed I would recommend trying to keep an open mind (as I do) about all possibilities. But ultimately life is about choices.
On your third paragraph, about probabilities, I agree that any hypothesis must take account of the peculiar circumstances of the case. I don’t think the fact that the killer had three magazines in his pocket necessarily means that he came to Le Martinet with the intention of using them all. Nor does the fact that the AHs had an exotic background necessarily mean that a more banal explanation is any less likely.
Going forward, we need facts, not factoids. You are being a little unfair to journalists when you describe their minds as vapid: I feel that their output is far from dull and insipid, which is what that word implies, but on the contrary rather colourful and even imaginative. Because of this, the best media sources are those which provide direct quotations (as Parry did with Maillaud) or on the record interviews (like the France Blue one with Christelle Menegaldo). And of course information from French official and police sources, whether public or leaked to media contacts. The fruits of “one’s own research” may also be valuable, as long as they are subject to the same due diligence and validation as any other information
MN, read your Daily Mail today, they arrested a second man who had been driving a Ford Fusion inside the factory grounds:
Local newspaper Dauphine Libere is reporting that a second person has now been arrested, believed to be the man who drove the Ford Fusion ‘preview’ car around the factory this morning before the attack.
UPDATE: The second man arrested has been released.
La victime, 54 ans, était directeur commercial au sein de l’entreprise de transport Colicom/ATC où travaillait aussi l’auteur présumé de l’attentat Yassin Salhi
Trois autres personnes ont été interpellées: la femme et la soeur du suspect qui résidait en famille à Saint-Priest dans la banlieue lyonnaise; et le propriétaire d’un véhicule repéré à proximité du site, finalement relâché.
http://www.ledauphine.com/isere-nord/2015/06/26/saint-quentin-fallavier-une-explosion-chez-air-products
MN
Riiight. . .
So, posts about Courtney Love are “very, very amusing“.
But posts discussing the statement in Parry’s book that “Saad had tracker software on his computer” are “stuff of little relevance“.
Why do you want to shut down that line of inquiry? Are you working for someone who hacked the tracker software?
GIP,
The original reports were about Google Latitude on his phone, “Saad had tracker software on his computer”, is this the sort of thing someone puts on themselves in case it was stolen ?
Which brings me to Suhailas computer, Le Parisien wrote it had a programme/bug which was able to read remotely everything written by the operator.
But in TPs book he writes about the Tumba burglary where a computer was taken, the two cannot be the same, can they ?
Could it be the former was with Suhaila ?
The specifics were never made clear, I assumed the computer was in her Swedish Appartment, because just suppose she had the bugged computer with her, anything she typed could still be viewed remotely.
Le Parisien wrote this remote access was mostly made when Haydar was absent, did someone else have knowledge of this ?
I cannot find the original press article.
Pink, referred to in this article:
http://www.pressawards.org.uk/userfiles/files/Winners2012/entries-30120614-01154.pdf
On reflection, there are many discrepancies in the piece compared to what is known today
For as good as the article is, it still differs to Tom Parrys account and later Press reports.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Features/article1168670.ece
He had set up Google Latitude on his Android phone, wanting and encouraging his friends to track him on his travels.
That was confirmed by FB, and hacking either his Google account or that one any one of his friends would have enabled the perpetrator(s) to track him at least intermittently, through WiFi.
The trouble with this technology, or a keyring
http://www.looqi.com/EN/product2.php
or indeed a common-or-garden GPS vehicle tracking device
http://www.ebay.com/sch/Tracking-Devices-/73362/i.html
(which the suit man could have stuck to Saad’s car the evening before the murders) is that they can at most tell you where the target currently is, not where he is going to go next. However, it is clear that whoever committed the murders arrived at the Martinet before the AHs, implying that either he knew that they were heading there or that this was a chance encounter.
Any “technical explanation” of how the killer could have known where the AHs were heading on that day is somewhat convoluted. The only ones that I can think of would (a) involve Saad using his phone as a sat nav device and programming the location of the Martinet as his intended destination, or (b) the killer having placed an audio bug inside the car. Whilst both are theoretically possible (the spyware on Suhaila’s computer probably would have allowed the attacker remotely to switch on the built-in microphone and eavesdrop upon her while she was connected to the Internet), they are, to my mind at least, not very likely. In my opinion, the most likely scenario is that, if the killer knew where they were heading, he knew because one of them had told him or an associate of his.
Interesting Peter so the children might even have had trackers .
I thought FB said SAH didn’t like using his phone abroad because of the cost .
@ Pink
That’s right. I don’t think that Saad had Google Latitude on all the time because of the cost. Nonetheless, his friends (and possibly a hacker) would have been able to track him whenever he was connected to a local WiFi network, such as the WiFi of the camping site. Still, the basic fact remains that tracking somebody is not the same thing as being able to predict their future movements. As he arrived at the Martinet before the AHs, and as the Martinet is such an unlikely place for them to have visited, the killer must have known beforehand that they would go there – or it was a chance encounter.
@ M., 27 Jun, 2015 – 8:44 am
Suhaila must have had two or more computers. One (guessing, I should say a tablet or a notebook) on which the gendarmerie found something like this installed
http://www.e-spy-software.com/remote_spy.shtml
and another one in her flat in Tumba – which was nicked and on which the police consequently could not have found anything. I shall stick my neck out by speculating that the one in Tumba was removed precisely because it also had spyware installed on it, which is a pain to deinstall. Remote Access Trojans are designed to resist attempts to detect and remove them, making that task well-nigh impossible even if you know that they are there because you are the one who originally installed them.
So, Peter, you speculate someone took the computer for more than the information on it.
Following that line, someone had to or was told to get that computer out of the appartment.
Fat Bastard/James Mathews did say he was able to follow Saad until Dover (?) then it was switched off due to the costs of roaming ?
If it had been HT who put the spyware on I assume he would have had to contact a mate to go and pinch it and the police would probably have been intercepting any such conversations , in a high profile murder investigation it would be foolhardy to break in and steal a comp would putting spyware on warrant such a risk ?
@ M.
Fat Bastard/James Mathews did say he was able to follow Saad until Dover (?) then it was switched off due to the costs of roaming ?
That makes sense. FB would have been able to locate Saad while the latter was logged into a WiFi network abroad, though.
Regarding the (desktop?) computer in Tumba, I can think of two likely reasons why it was stolen: to prevent the RAT from being found on it and/or to prevent police from accessing the data stored on it. Whoever installed the RAT on her notebook (?) certainly had no reason to steal the computer in Tumba in order to obtain the information stored on that one, as he would have had that information already anyway.
Swedish police seem to suspect that Suhaila’s brother may have had something to do with the break-in. Be that as it may, the chances are that whoever installed the RAT on her notebook was close enough to her to obtain unsupervised access to her notebook. Although it is possible to install such software remotely, it is much easier and safer to do so directly. Thus, if you will forgive yet another piece of wild speculation, the person who installed the RAT on her notebook and the one who stole her desktop may well have been the same person, someone close enough to her to have had keys to her flat. Thus, a break-in had to be staged in order to obfuscate the fact that the burglar possessed a key …
Begs the question why would her brother be spying on her ?
@ Pink
Indeed. I have idly mused before that Suhaila may have had her own offshore nest-egg in Geneva, and that she may have wanted to gift a substantial part of that nest-egg to her favourite nieces. Her family might not have approved of that plan, preferring to keep the money on their side of the family.
Anyway, from what I have read about him, HT seems an unlikely candidate for a computer whiz, and he doesn’t really sound like the kind of person who has “mates”. However, he would certainly have had keys to the flat, enabling him to let whoever installed the RAT into the flat, or perhaps allowing that person to have a copy of his key made.
If that was the case then who’s to say they didn’t instigate the murder I haven’t seen much spotlight on that angle only a little look at HT who was locked up at the time , did BB do any research on the brother I can’t remember it if there was ?
It was her brother-in-law, Ahmad Al-Saffar who was questioned, according to Tom Parry, Peter I also thought about a staged break-in, I suppose it depends what else was taken.
He is the man who took charge of the situation, with regard to the girls future and the funeral, I think he spoke on the radio as well (?)
Martinet
24 Rue du Limousin
38070 Saint-Quentin-Fallavier
France
I don’t know if this is significant but this eatery is within spitting distance of Airproducts,
be-heading site.
Quote Shelock 23rd June 2015
“As I get it, the late PM had a lawyer.
I guess, just in case of a pure and innocent suicide nobody needs a lawyer”
Could the lawyer that Patrice Menegaldo had during his 45 minute interview
be the same lawyer now employed by his sister,Christelle MENEGALDO
it would make a nice symmetry?
Found it M 0836
The uncle of the woman murdered with her husband in a car in Annecy has spoken to the Today Programme’s Zubeida Malik about the effect the murder has had on the family and their frustrations at the French investigators handling of the case. And the BBC’s Paris correspondent Christian Fraser gives the latest on the case in France.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9762000/9762096.stm
Thanks Pink,
a good interview by an uncle of Iqbal, does this mean he was the brother of Suhalia or brother in law.
He has a poor regard for the Annecy Prosecutor
and says several times that they can not understand why he only concentrates on the family al-Hilli,
this uncle thinks that the FRENCH will not look at the FRENCH.
I must say that is also how I think.
Michael, this is long before we heard of the burglary in Tumba, he is Ikbals paternal uncle.
Mr al-Saffar did not respond to Tom Parrys request for contact:
‘I have repeatedly tried to contact Mr al-Saffar at home and at the university, but he has not responded. Haydar has not been quizzed in relation to this project.’
That is just fine, someone from the al-Hilli side not wanting to speak to Tom Parry.
Pink, have you read the Tom Parry book ?
He sort of covers it, page 255, final paragraph:
“Of course we have asked whether the target could have been the grandmother. It’s true that she could have been. There are strange things, notably that her home was ransacked and robbed. A computer disappeared. Little things like that about which I haven’t spoken before are also lines of questioning. When you go to a crime scene, you have to consider that all of them, even the children, could have been the target. That is why we have dug so much into everone’s lives.”
Atributed to Monsieur Maillaud.
Just to play this out, if she had any money, Maillaud says she was not a rich woman, someone could have disliked her proposal to give money to her granddaughters, who whilst her daughters children were not al-Saffars, money may have been accumulated with her husband and his family and/or her two sons may not have been enamoured.
How likely, absolutely no idea.
Hervé Cornara is the first FRENCH person beheaded by Islamists in FRANCE
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.rtl.fr/actu/societe-faits-divers/le-journal-de-8h30-herve-cornara-l-homme-decapite-par-yassin-salhi-etait-son-patron-7778904477&prev=search
Pink & Peter
You wrote It was reported that someone in the UK had noticed his car hadn’t moved and went around to the house in Claygate ,that sounded odd to me what use would going around to the house be if the car wasn’t moving in France and how long not moving would cause alarm ?
I seem to remember that the poster “FB” wrote in a mea culpa, on a forum (maybe this one, MZT or DZ) that in fact this story originated from his visit to the house when the presspack was milling around outside. I seem to remember that he told them this to ‘prank’ them somehow, maybe for asking impertinent questions.
However the press ran with the story. I seem to remember that he later effectively backtracked and said that the last latitude location he had seen was the departure port.
Your other points have been covered promptly by Peter – Thanks Peter!
The only things I would add are that I favour the “technical explanation” of SAH using his smartphone as a sat-nav device. I do agree though, that “one of them had told him or an associate of his” is more likely.
Peter, spookily, you have articulated almost exactly my views on the Tumba break-in, missing PC, etcetera. Pink and M.’s comments on ‘who’ also reflect mine.
I have some minor stuff to add about the Tumba angle which I shall post over the weekend when I get a free moment. In the meantime a few questions:-
What was the date of the break-in?
How many grandchildren did Suhalia have?
If one was illegitimate or possibly out-of-faith (issue of her son and a Swedish woman) would that be an ‘issue’ culturally for her?
If she had known that two others (Z & Z) were illegitimate would that be an issue?
@ MN I have no idea what the relationship is he sounds like a nice man to me, I haven’t delved much into anything other than the basics I gave a up a long time ago until the conversation picked up again,I keep an eye on whats going on and get inspired now and again to check something out.
The french side of the investigation is frustrating and to be fair we have heard even less from the uk side ,who know’s maybe they have their reasons.