Four dead in British car shooting in French Alps

CHEVALINE: Four people were killed and a young girl left fighting for her life on Wednesday after a mysterious shooting centred on a British-registered car in a French Alpine beauty spot.

The car, a BMW, was found with the bodies of a man, in the front, and two women who were seated in the back, local police said.

The body of a second man, a cyclist, was found on the ground just to the right of the car while a seriously wounded girl was discovered on the left of the vehicle, with dozens of spent cartridges scattered on the ground.

A helicopter rushed the girl to hospital in the regional capital Grenoble where surgeons operated on her Wednesday evening.

Local prosecutor Eric Maillaud had earlier mistakenly told journalists she had died.

The car was registered in Britain, Maillaud said in a briefing to reporters in Chevaline, located close to Lake Annecy in the Haute-Savoie area of eastern France.

The shooting took place in a tree-lined car park on the edge of the picturesque village that is popular with tourists and second homeowners from all over Europe, including many Britons.

"We haven't yet been able to establish the nationality of the victims," said Maillaud, who did not have access to the car pending forensic examinations.

"For the moment we have not been able to establish a theory about what has happened here."

A spokesman for the Foreign Office in London said: "We are aware of the reports of the shooting and we are looking into these urgently." The Paris embassy was also liaising with the police in Britain.

Police sources told AFP late Wednesday that the registration details of the car had been been established but that the identities of the victims were not yet clear.

The bodies were discovered by another cyclist at around 3:50 pm (1350 GMT). He was being questioned by police on Wednesday evening.

"We are going to try to interview people in the neighbourhood," Maillaud told reporters, stressing that they had not yet formed any hypothesis as to what had happened.

Police had sealed off the area around the car to allow forensic experts to go over the scene before the corpses were removed.

Experts from the national gendarmerie's IRCGN unit, who are assigned to major crime cases, were on the scene.

They were expected to collect DNA samples, shells left at the scene for ballistics analysis and check for traces of other vehicles that may have been at the scene.

Maillaud said they would be taken to Grenoble for autopsies.

Around 60 gendarmes were involved in a search for potential clues which continued after nightfall.

The position of the bodies in the car and the large number of cartridges found at the scene suggested the killing could have been the result of an armed robbery that the cyclist may have inadvertently interrupted.

But there was no immediate comment on that theory from the prosecutor or police at the scene.

The prosecutor said he would be giving an update on the course of the investigation in a press conference at 2:00 pm Thursday (1200 GMT) in the nearby town of Annecy.