Haute-Savoie. Is Chevaline’s case a cold case?
The criminal massacre of Chevaline, which occurred on September 5, 2012 at the end of Lake Annecy, is one of the biggest unsolved French cases to date. The quadruple murder of the Al-Hilli family and the Savoyard cyclist Sylvain Mollier, perpetrated on a forest car park in the Combe d’Ire, would appear, to some likely, as a case that could evolve in the judicial center specializing in cold cases.
Nearly 10 years after the killing, the mystery remains unsolved. No defendants, a complex crime, multiple leads and an international dimension between England, Iraq and France, so many criteria that could play in favor of a resumption of the case by a specialized national prosecutor’s office , in the future.
Work carried out on the seals to focus on the preservation of evidence
“For us, it’s not a cold case”, insisted the public prosecutor of Annecy Line Bonnet-Mathis in September 2021, referring to “work carried out on the seals to focus on the preservation of material evidence . “Despite a recent legal twist, with the police custody of the biker, the witness was finally released, no new element has however appeared in the last file.
However, will the Annecy prosecutor’s office propose the case to the judiciary as the procedure provides? Nothing is less certain, the reluctance of local prosecutors to “let go” of their most emblematic cases is real. Especially since, on this file, the case is still active. If the slaughter of Chevaline went back to Paris at the national pole, the research section of the gendarmerie of Chambéry kept the investigating service in charge.