Not Forgetting the al-Hillis 22278


The mainstream media for the most part has moved on. But there are a few more gleanings to be had, of perhaps the most interesting comes from the Daily Mirror, which labels al-Hilli an extremist on the grounds that he was against the war in Iraq, disapproved of the behaviour of Israel and had doubts over 9/11 – which makes a great deal of the population “extremist”. But the Mirror has the only mainstream mention I can find of the possibility that Mossad carried out the killings. Given Mr al-Hilli’s profession, the fact he is a Shia, the fact he had visited Iran, and the fact that Israel heas been assassinating scientists connected to Iran’s nuclear programme, this has to be a possibility. There are of course other possibilities, but to ignore that one is ludicrous.

Which leads me to the argument of Daily Mail crime reporter, Stephen Wright, that the French police should concentrate on the idea that this was a killing by a random Alpine madman or racist bigot. Perfectly possible, of course, and the anti-Muslim killings in Marseille might be as much a precedent as Mossad killings of scientists. But why the lone madman idea should be the preferred investigation, Mr Wright does not explain. What I did find interesting from a man who has visited many crime scenes are his repeated insinuations that the French authorities are not really trying very hard to find who the killers were, for example:

the crime scene would have been sealed off for a minimum of seven to ten days, to allow detailed forensic searches for DNA, fibres, tyre marks and shoe prints to take place.
Nearby bushes and vegetation would have been searched for any discarded food and cigarette butts left by the killer, not to mention the murder weapon.
But from what I saw at the end of last week, no such searches had taken place and potentially vital evidence could have been missed. House to house inquiries in the local area had yet to be completed and police had not made specific public appeals for information about the crime. No reward had been put up for information about the shootings.
Behind the scenes, what other short cuts have been taken? Have police seized data identifying all mobile phones being used in the vicinity of the murders that day?

The idea that the French authorities – who are quite as capable as any other of solving cases – are not really trying very hard is an interesting one.

Which leads me to this part of a remarkable article from the Daily Telegraph, which if true points us back towards a hit squad and discounts the ides that there was only one gun:

Claims that only one gun was used to kill everybody is likely to be disproved by full ballistics test results which are out in October.
While the 25 spent bullet cartridges found at the scene are all of the same kind, they could in fact have come from a number of weapons of the same make.
This throws up the possibility of a well-equipped, highly-trained gang circling the car and then opening fire.
Both children were left alive by the killers, who had clinically pumped bullets into everybody else, including five into Mr Mollier.
Zainab was found staggering around outside the car by Brett Martin, a British former RAF serviceman who cycled by moments after the attack, but he saw nobody except the schoolgirl.
Her sister, Zeena, was found unscathed and hiding in the car eight hours later.
Both sisters are now back in Britain, and are believed to have been reunited at a secret location near London.

There are of course a number of hit squad options, both governmental and private, which might well involve iraqi or Iranian interests – on both of which the mainstream media have been very happy to speculate while almost unanimously ignoring Israel.

But what interests me is why the Daily Telegraph choose, in the face of all the evidence, to minimise the horrific nature of the attack by stating that “Both children were left alive by the killers”? Zainab was not left alive by design, she was shot in the chest and her skull was stove in, which presumably was a pretty serious attempt to kill a seven year-old child. The other girl might very well have succeeded in hiding from the killers under her mother’s skirts, as she hid from the first rescuers, and then for eight hours from the police.

The Telegraph article claims to be informed by sources close to the investigation. So they believe it was a group of people, and feel motivated to absolve those people from child-killing. Now what could the Daily Telegraph be thinking?


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22,278 thoughts on “Not Forgetting the al-Hillis

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  • Ferret

    Repeat: Please do not follow Katie’s advice about saving pages. Even on a Mac.

    For Mac users

    How to Save Web Pages in Safari

    By Mark L. Chambers from Mac OS X Snow Leopard All-in-One For Dummies

    If you’re surfing the Internet in Safari and encounter a page that you’d like to load later, Safari lets you save it to disk in its entirety. (Just the text, mind you, not the images.) To save a Web page to your computer so you can access it later, follow these steps:

    1. Display the desired page.
    2. Choose File->Save As. Alternatively press Command+S.
    3. In the Save As text field, type a name for the saved page. 4. From the Where pop-up menu, navigate to where you want to store the file on your system.
    5. Click the Format pop-up menu to choose the format for the saved page.
    6. Click Save to begin the download process.

    http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-save-web-pages-in-safari.html

  • Katie

    Oh for heavens sake ……. A trap, lol !!!

    You are paranoid.
    I was told by someone who knows much more about computers & privacy than you Ferret.

  • dopey

    @ Ferret

    Ancestry.com is an American company, HQ in Utah. Its listed. Rumours have swirled for years that it’s a Mormon company, which it denies. Recent speculation that it’s about to be sold to a European venture capital company- Permira.

  • straw44berry

    Thanks Felix
    I wondered about the woman in white pants too

    From Leila Lamnaouer twitter:-

    7/9 8.53am Car certainly had a flat tyre
    8/9 7.14am Different clothes were found
    8/9 7.27am Child Seat on the Front
    14/9 9.20am Zainab saw 1 killer

    All these are google translations could someone check translation for accuracy.

    LL was tweeting directly every few seconds during the press conferences suggesting (that assuming no translation errors) these are accurate.

  • straw44berry

    The bodies of the 2 women in the car are described as prostrate
    – laying face down? not possible in the rear seat of a car
    -so laying back or across the seats

    ————–
    Local police defended the decisions that led to the four-year-old being left in the car for so long.

    “We had instructions not to enter the car and not to move the bodies,” Lieutenant-Colonel Benoit Vinnemann of the local gendarmerie said.

    IF I GET A POUND FOR EVERY TIME I FORGET TO FILL IN THE CAPTCHA I’M GONNA BE RICH 🙂

    The gendarmes were unable to open the doors of the family’s BMW for fear that bullet-pierced windows would shatter, potentially compromising the work of the IRCGN forensic team.

    “Firemen, technicians and doctors all looked into the car through the holes in the windows but none of them saw the girl,” Vinnemann added.

    A helicopter equipped with a thermal camera took images of the car to check if there were any other bodies inside but also failed to identify the girl.

    **** “She was so close to her mother they appeared as one mass,”**** said Vinnemann.

    ———
    Doesnt suggest laying more slumped forwards
    Both appeared as 1 mass – both alive LOL

    Which is why Zeena was smiling when taken from the car. I for one wouldnt have been.

  • Katie

    RE: Catcha, I’m glad I’m not the only one, Straw !

    “The gendarmes were unable to open the doors of the family’s BMW for fear that bullet-pierced windows would shatter”
    Do you think this has been interpreted wrongly into people/journalists saying the doors were locked ?

  • Katie

    Sorry to come back to the mother, but I’ve been thinking about the mother, why did she leave her half of the house to Saad or either son for that matter , normally the husband would get everything & the children in turn on his death, did she think father would sell their home OR did she know it didn’t belong to them but thought naming a son would give them some rights should a sale be forced……as someone else said, it looked like a letting as they certainly have not cared for it ?

    Surely she knew the father would not will the house to someone else & turf them out, or was he in debt at the time & she thought he would have to sell it ?

    Have we established how Kadhim earned money in the UK…….how did he get started if he left Iraq with nothing ?
    Someone said there was a mortgage, but how did they fund it or who did?

    Felix, that’s a lot of work you’ve done there, on Icke, top marks.

  • Ferret

    @Straw

    Local police defended the decisions that led to the four-year-old being left in the car for so long.

    “We had instructions not to enter the car and not to move the bodies,” Lieutenant-Colonel Benoit Vinnemann of the local gendarmerie said.

    Yes, the local police would be desperate to clear their names and make sure everyone knew they were doing their job properly. Just like the Dallas police in 1963.

    Having the local police to leave the car alone for 8 hours leaves the field wide open for explanations and theories about what (or who) was really in the car. If the secret services took control of the crime scene, anything is possible…

    Doesnt suggest laying more slumped forwards. Both appeared as 1 mass – both alive LOL

    I would have thought that the bulk of an adult body on top of a live 4-year-old would mask the child’s heat from an infra-red camera positioned above in a helicopter…

    After all, infra-red is just like light and cannot pass through a solid object… So that part might be true? Or would she heat up the area around her?

    And in any case, would the heat even be seen even through the steel roof of the car? I wish I knew more about this.

    Which is why Zeena was smiling when taken from the car. I for one wouldnt have been.

    She was?!? How odd. I must’ve missed that pic. Could you pls post a link?

  • dopey

    Katie

    If this IS what happened with the house, then it could have been for inheritance tax reasons. Until a couple of years ago the allowance free from IHT wasn’t transferable between spouses.

    I’m guessing that there could have been a (verbal?) agreement or understanding that Saad would get the house, and then eventually Zaid would get cash/other assets to that same value. Pure guesswork though, in the absence of any “facts” so far. I’m taking anything so far in respect to the ins and outs of that house and the inheritance with a pinch of salt.

  • Katie

    Dopey.
    I know little of IHT UK, but I have a recollection the transfer had to take place 7 years before death, to avoid it the property is gifted tax free , is that right now ?

  • NR

    @ Tim V 30 Oct, 2012 – 3:23 pm
    “at Ferret 30 Oct, 2012 – 3:07 pm
    as the firearms expert Ferret we know bullets were fired into the driver’s side front and back windows (well we assume into the back as the photo doesn’t show). If casings were located roughly adjacent to the offside rear wheel as several graphics suggest, doesn’t this positively rule out the Luger which ejects up and to the RIGHT? (i.e. the front off-side quarter of the car NOT rear?)”

    Somebody at MZT mentioned that if the shooter was holding the gun flat, as is the fashion after “Scarface” the left or right ejection means nothing.

    @Felix
    “Reason being that with eg 9mm para the entry hole is small and the exit hole is big. See eg the first first minute of {http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0oOVwcMBag}.

    The 7.65mm Parabellum has around 20% less power than its big brother the 9mm Parabellum but it has a very similar muzzle velocity. (7.65mm goes at the same speed, but has less weight in the bullet.)

    Obviously a human head is not a watermelon, and an FMJ 7.65mm Para is not an FMJ 9mm Para so this isn’t conclusive, but it is indicative.”

    Also at MZT someone pointed out that if the shooter used expanding ammo, “hollow-point”? – I’m not sure of the termonology, is it the same as para? – then the shots wouldn’t go through glass. The bullets would deform, deflect, lose velocity. They said SWAT teams also carry regular ammo for when they need to shoot through glass.

  • Thomas

    @Dopey
    30 Oct, 2012 – 8:53 pm

    It sounds that Zaids offer was very reasonable ( if the house was worth 1 – 1,5 mill £):

    “Saad al-Hilli and his brother Zaid jointly owned the home in Claygate, Surrey, where Saad lived with his family.

    Saad told friends his brother wanted the money for his share of the house – approximately £400,000.”

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19729566

  • dopey

    Katie I think you may be right; I’m not sure. I know the 7 year rule does apply to capital gains tax and I guess to IHT too. With CGT there’s a sliding scale ie if someone dies in the first year or so almost all that is liable to be paid ordinarily is due but if they die after six years maybe only 10% or less is due. It works something like that anyway.

  • Ferret

    @Katie

    Once again, please stop with the abuse.

    And it is not paranoia to take sensible precautions on the internet.

    Anyone following your instructions to add “?com_num=500″ to the end of a URL would have exposed themselves to the possibility of being tracked as a user of this site.

    (Dopey, I’m glad I saved you from this trap.)

    Your attempt to explain it away as a mac oddity has failed. Now you try to paint me as being paranoid, and as someone who does not know about computers or security.

    But the problem really is that if one googles for com_num=500 one doesn’t get any answers at all. None whatsoever. So it appears that this “tip” of yours doesn’t really exist, does it.

    So… do you have a convincing explanation of where you got this “tip” from, and what it’s for?

    If not then it can only reasonably be assumed that you intentionally placed it here, with the obvious connotations.

    WARNING: If you use Katie’s tip to add ?com_num=500 to the end of a URL you want to save you risk being tracked as a reader of this site.

  • Ferret

    Here’s an example of how URL tracking works, taken from SurveyMonkey’s website. There are of course many more examples that can be found.

    Can I track respondents using a unique ID?

    If you want to track respondents … you must customize the end of the URL with an ID for each respondent.

    … create a unique ID ending for each respondent by adding “?c=” at the end of the link followed by the ID number.

    EX of custom ending: ?c=00001

    http://help.surveymonkey.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/141/~/track-respondents-with-a-unique-id-by-appending-that-number-to-the-end-of-a-web

    Note that in the case of Katie’s advice (?com_num=500) every poster here who used it would be tracked with the same tag rather than a unique tag per individual, but the principle is the same.

  • dopey

    @ thomas

    Apparently initial reports as to the house’s value were inflated and it was actually worth around £800k, not the £1m to £1.5m originally stated.

    What I can’t understand is why Saad feared he might lose the house. The £800k in the Swiss account obviously more than covered any 50% share of the Claygate home Zaid may have had. Then there is the property in Spain, albeit that is allegedly worth only £50k, and the alleged home in Switzerland no one seems to have found anything about.

    So, with £800k+ in the bank plus the Spanish flat (ignoring the mystery Swiss house for now) and allowing for a maximum of £220k IHT, that still would leave at least £660k – £400k to Zaid for his 50% of Claygate then around £115k cash each. So what was the dispute about?

  • Ferret

    Any inheritance tax on the house is a non-issue as it can be paid off over 10 years:

    “… tax on land and buildings can be paid in installments over 10 years, unless the asset is sold within that time, in which case the bill must be settled straight after the sale.”

    {http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/oct/25/inheritancetax.tax}

    “You can only pay Inheritance Tax in instalments on certain types of assets – usually those that may take time to sell in order to raise the money. These include:
    land and buildings (such as the deceased’s house)…
    You must pay the tax in full when the assets are sold.”

    {http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/inheritancetax/paying-iht/yearly-instalments/index.htm}

  • Ferret

    And this…

    “Paying by instalments on a house

    Most people choose to pay by instalments when the estate includes a house.

    If you plan to sell the house, you only need to find 10 per cent of the Inheritance Tax due by the six-month deadline. You will then have a year before the next instalment is due to sell the house and pay the full balance.

    If you plan to keep the house and live in it, you may prefer to pay by instalments because you only need to find 10 per cent of the Inheritance Tax each year (plus the interest), rather than having to pay all of it up front in one lump sum.”

    http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/inheritancetax/paying-iht/yearly-instalments/index.htm

  • Katie

    ……..but Thomas /Dopey, if they cannot access the Swiss bank account you can see there IS a problem.

    Oh & who owns the French wreck ?

  • Tim V

    At Ferret
    30 Oct, 2012 – 3:54 pm thanks for this “PoliceOne.com” article Ferret. All useful stuff. “Nearly 8,000 rounds fired by Los Angeles County (CA) sheriff’s deputies have now conclusively proved what the Force Science Research Center first asserted more than 2 years ago: The single greatest influence on where spent shell casings land when ejected from a semiautomatic handgun is how the pistol is physically manipulated by the shooter, not any rigid, intrinsic mechanical factor.”

    First it has to be said the tests on which this conclusion was made appears hardly unbiased. The findings are used to get a cop off a murder charge, which it did. (Apparently individuals are regularly shot for “trying to run them over”!) A very useful “get out of trouble clause” whenever the casings don’t support the officer’s story.

    However in this case we know where the shooter had to be. (Simple geometry from head through helpful bullet holes in glass) In these circumstances, if the graphics are accurate (iffy) and casings are rear offside of BMW, NO WAY CAN THIS BE LUGER as invariably ejects up and to the RIGHT.

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