ANNECY, France — French authorities struggled Thursday to explain why no one found a 4-year-old girl for eight hours at a blood-strewn crime scene as she huddled in a car under the skirt of her dead mother or grandmother.
The discovery Thursday of the girl, apparently unharmed, heightened the drama around a mysterious shooting rampage in the French Alps that left four adults dead and a 7-year-old girl hospitalized after being shot and beaten.
The reason for the slayings remained unclear a day after a cyclist came across the bodies in an area near the village of Chevaline. Links emerged Thursday tying the slain family to Britain, Iraq and Sweden.
Prosecutor Eric Maillaud said investigators were searching for possible perpetrators and studying all possibilities, including a score-settling attack or simply that the family was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The bodies of a man and two women were found shot to death in a BMW, and the body of an unrelated male French cyclist was found nearby.
The two girls, who police said were sisters, were put under police care. Authorities tried to explain how the 4-year-old went unnoticed.
“The girl was found totally immobile in fact on the floor of the vehicle, behind the front passenger-side seat, under the legs — under the skirt — of one of the women who were killed, around a large travel bag, totally invisible and silent,” Maillaud said.
