For some reason, investigators decided against opening a car following a gruesome shooting attack on a family of British holidaymakers on a remote road in the French Alps yesterday.

French police said a father, mother and grandmother from the same family were found dead in a BMW in eastern France yesterday afternoon, but police were under instruction not to open the car to check if anyone had maybe survived.

A four-year-old girl was forced to hide for eight hours after the massacre in a car park in a forested area near the village of Chevaline, near Lake Annecy, which is a popular tourist destination in the Haute-Savoie region.

Public prosecutor Eric Maillaud said the child was only discovered when investigators went into the vehicle at the crime scene for a closer inspection, almost eight hours after the massacre.

The little girl had hidden between the legs of her dead mother and grandmother.

Lieutenant-Colonel Benoit Vinnemann, of the local gendarmerie, said:

We had instructions not to enter the car and not to move the bodies. Firemen, technicians and doctors all looked into the car through the holes in the windows but none of them saw the girl. She didn’t budge. She stayed under the legs of her mother. She was so close to her mother they appeared as one mass.

Another police source said that they had to wait for forensics teams to arrive from Paris, some 550km away:

The reconstruction of the crime scene meant that everything had to remain in place. This meant doors and windows had to remain shut until forensics officers and ballistics specialists arrived from Paris. Windows had bullet holes in them but had not fallen in. The fear was that they would if the doors were opened.

Authorities only heard that there was another daughter after discovering that the family had been staying at a nearby campsite.

Reuters reported that Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud told reporters:

She’s clearly shocked but she’s doing okay. She’s not injured. She started smiling and speaking English as soon as a gendarme from the Chambery search brigade took her in his arms and got her out of the car.

An eight-year-old, thought to be the surviving girl’s elder sister, was found near the car with gunshot wounds and a fractured skull. She is currently in a critical condition in hospital in the city of Grenoble.

Another victim, a man who appeared to be a local cyclist, was found dead nearby. Witnesses described a car speeding off around the time that a passer-by spotted the bodies.

The police have no leads.

The father has been named as London man Saad al Hilli.

[Source: Telegraph]