Four of the family members died on March 24 last year after falling 20 metres from their seventh-floor apartment in the plush town of Lake Geneva, reported Al Jazeera:

A man – aged 40, his 41-year-old wife, her twin sister, the couple’s eight-year-old daughter and their boy plunged more than 20 metres from the apartment, where they all lived “withdrawn from society”, according to police.

The 15-year-old boy has apparently recovered from his serious injuries and, fortunately, or unfortunately, has no memory of that day, investigators say.

Police and prosecutors are working on the theory of “collective suicide”:

The Vaud regional police announced on Tuesday that their findings “make it possible to rule out the intervention of a third party and suggest that all the victims jumped from the balcony one after the other”.

Police found no evidence of struggle and found a step ladder on the balcony, further confirming that the family likely killed themselves:

Investigators said two officers knocked on the apartment door at 6:15am (04:15 GMT), wanting to speak with the father about the home-schooling arrangements for his son.

A voice asked who was at the door, but then said nothing further. Unable to enter, the officers left. Shortly before 7:00am (05:00 GMT), all five jumped from the balcony within the space of five minutes.

The police added that there didn’t seem to be any signs that suicide was on the cards, except that “since the start of the pandemic, the family was very interested in conspiracy and survivalist theories”, per BBC:

After the deaths, police found their apartment full of food, medicines, and hygiene materials, carefully stored and organised. The family rarely went out, and the children were home-schooled.

The two women had a deep-seated suspicion of government and local authorities, investigators say, and had brought up the children to believe that the world was a hostile place.

The police statement said that “all these elements suggest … fear of the authorities interfering in their lives”.

Apparently, the twins – Nasrine and Narjisse Feraoun, who were educated as a dentist and an ophthalmologist respectively, – were granddaughters of Algerian novelist Mouloud Feraoun, a close friend of the French philosopher Albert Camus.

Feraoun was assassinated in Algiers in 1962 by a far-right French pro-colonial group.

I guess extremism runs in the family.