As detectives from France and England continue to investigate the horrific killings, they admit it is unlikely the four-year-old girl who survived can provide any clues that might help them to track down the gunman
A blue and white tent, the sort normally used to protect murder scenes, went up yesterday outside the home of Saad al-Hilli and his family in Surrey. But the victims were lying some 600 miles away in a mortuary in France as police forces on both sides of the Channel tried to unearth a motive for the brutal killings in the Alps that have united two countries in horror.
Mechanical design engineer Hilli and his wife, Iqbal, were killed last Wednesday along with another woman whose identity is still unconfirmed but may be Iqbal's mother.
Swedish authorities have confirmed that a passport discovered on the scene corresponds to a Swedish person living in Sweden, but as yet no absolute connection has been made between the older woman in the car and either the passport or between her and the rest of the victims, the local prosecutor said.
Cyclist Sylvain Mollier, 45, whom authorities believe was in the wrong place at the wrong time, also died. Each victim received two bullets to the head.
At just after 2pm yesterday two French and two British detectives entered the Hilli home in Claygate, staying for half an hour as forensic investigators, wearing paper suits and masks, combed the property.
Both sides are keen to stress their commitment to solving the case. In a statement issued through Surrey police, Colonel Marc de Tarle of the National Gendarmerie Criminal Affairs Bureau, said cooperation "both on the human level and the technical level" between the British and French authorities was going smoothly.
But hopes that detectives could learn more from the Hillis' four-year-old daughter, Zeena, who survived by hiding under her mother's skirt, appeared remote after Eric Maillaud, the French prosecutor in charge of the case, suggested she had seen nothing.
"The witness statement of the four-year-old girl, she just talked about a fury, a terror," he said. "She explained that from the beginning of the murder she was already between her mother and that other woman and she rushed under her mother's legs, her mother's skirt," Maillaud added. He said it was a miracle that the dead couple's other daughter, seven-year-old Zainab, who was shot in the shoulder and beaten, had survived.
If Hilli had been concerned about his personal security there was little evidence to confirm it at the family home. Two garage doors were secured with small padlocks while the low back gate was loosely secured with a bicycle lock. While a neighbour had closed circuit television surveillance at the front of his house, there were no cameras at the Hilli home.
John O'Connor, a former deputy commander of the Metropolitan Police, said he was astounded that such violence could have been visited on a family from the peaceful village where he had chosen to retire.
"The story of a family dispute is too remarkable," O'Connor said, referring to suggestions that the family had been divided by a dispute about inheritance after the death of Hilli's father. Public records show Saad's brother Zaid resigned from his small aeronautics design firm, Shtech Ltd., last year.
Maillaud said he had not heard about any possible inheritance issue and that Zaid remains "a free man." "I don't think a paid assassin would behave like this, killing the whole family. It is most probably linked to something in his past. The police will be looking for damaged business relations and anything that might have upset people in the Middle East."
Yesterday further details of the family's comfortable life in the Home Counties started to emerge. Saad al-Hilli, 50, came to Britain in the 1970s, reportedly after their business was looked upon "unfavourably" by Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party.
He was one of many Iraqis who settled in Britain after Saddam began nationalising private businesses and suppressing opponents. The Iraqi embassy estimates that there could be as many as 450,000 Iraqis in the UK, the majority of them arriving before the 2003 Iraq war. He and his dentist wife, Iqbal, who worked at a local surgery, were described as a "lovely couple" and keen caravanners who had previously visited France on holiday.
One acquaintance of Hilli who contacted the Observer described him as highly intelligent and very family-oriented. "He had a variety of friends, some were Iraqi and Arab but many weren't. He was religious but not devout and happy in the company of anyone."
Jack Saltman, a neighbour whose house backed on to the Hillis', said his neighbour was "a massively helpful man, a wonderful engineer" who helped him repair household machinery when it broke down. He described the girls as "absolutely gorgeous ... beautiful" and said they would often chat with him when he was in his garden.
Julian Stedman, Hilli's personal accountant for the past eight years, described him as a "family man". "He never talked about what he did in Iraq, he has been in the UK for quite a long time," Stedman said. "Most of his family are over here as far as I know."
The engineer started his own small business, Shtech Ltd, in 2001, and ran it from home, his accountant said, working on projects including several for the aircraft manufacturer Airbus.
He was also a director of a Swindon-based company offering "business services, aerial photographers and surveys services" and had worked for Guildford-based Surrey Satellite Technology as a contract mechanical design engineer since November 2010. "Saad's colleagues will remember him as an experienced and committed engineer who worked as part of a tightly knit team," said its chief executive, Dr Matt Perkins. "He was a personal friend to many of our staff here."
It was clear that the murders have touched even those who did not know the family. Yesterday afternoon in Clay-gate Amanda Lamble, and her daughter, Isabella, handed over a large bunch of flowers to police officers guarding the house.
"All families and children have them in their thoughts and parents are trying to help children understand what has happened," she said.
A similar sense of bewilderment was palpable at the scene of murder, the Alpine village of Chevaline. On Friday, police reopened the road that ran up to the murder scene, but the only visitors to the isolated forest car park were journalists picking over the broken glass and looking for bloodstains in the gravel.
"Our children are having difficulty sleeping at the moment, which is hardly surprising," admitted one local man. "They keep asking if we've locked the doors and shut all the windows."
Two women, who did not want to be named, said they had been planning to go for a cycle ride past the murder scene last Wednesday. "In the end we didn't," they said. "But it could have been us who were there at the wrong time."
Didier Berthollet, the mayor of Chevaline, said they had been besieged by journalists. "It feels like being on another planet," he said. Maillaud remained tight-lipped throughout Saturday's news conference, saying he was "at the limits" of what he could publically disclose.