Let me be upfront: none of my usual contacts, so far, has any knowledge about the very clinical murders in France of the Iraqi origin British Hilli family. I have seen various internet reports of the links of Mr Hilli to the defence industry and that the French cyclist victim was linked to the nuclear industry. I am not immediately concerned that the other cyclist who raised the alarm was ex-RAF; had that fact been sinister, it would have been hidden or he might not have raised the alarm at all.
In short, I really do not know what is happening here and I don’t think normal hierarchies within British security agencies know either. It may be genuinely random, or not. I am not posting to speculate or to spread knowledge, but because unless I do post, commenters will derail other threads to discuss this. Should I discover anything, I will let you know. But we may well never know; we still don’t really know who killed JFK, or Hilda Murrell. There is always an answer, but it is not always known to the public.
No excuse can justify the failure to identify and help the poor little girl who was still alive in the bottom of the car. Discovering if anybody was alive in the car should have outweighed every other consideration for the emergency services. Protocols for the dead will not help them much, whatever they may achieve for abstract justice. The living are easier to serve well, and this was a gross failure.
@ Anon:
If there was no mobile phone coverage at the site, who did the ex RAF Officer manage to call the ambulance for the injured girl?
– A very good question if the report is accurate. If just a local blackspot just moving a short distance might get a signal. If he had a satellite phone with him then that’s most certainly unusual.
Should be possible to check coverage maps for the area. Anyone have the coordinates handy (preferably as a link) for Google Earth/Maps?
Thanks Felix. I knew his name rang a bell. I will not be voting for him or any of the others for that matter.
Hurley is of the hang ’em and lock ’em up persuasion.
http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/People-want-ex-coppers-military-Police/story-16733490-detail/story.html
Meant to say. Spot the references to Baghdad and Iraq!
Not beyond the bounds of possibility I guess that a genuine ex RAF guy who spent a lot of time cycling in remote areas might have one of these http://www.g-comm.co.uk/product/102_9555-prepaid-airtime-iridium-satphone.html
Specifications
* Dimensions: 143 mm (L) x 55 mm (W) x 30 mm (D)
* Weight: 266g (9.4 oz)
If an intelligence agency were planning an assassination surely in order to get away with it they would need to carry it out at the right time i.e. when there would be another plausible reason for the death other than assassination. Dr Kelly’s suicide was put down to him being depressed about being named as the source for the revelation of the sexing up of the dossier. Did MI6 then use as a screen a family dispute to remove Al-Hilli because he knew something?
@Anon @Anders7777
Thanks for posting the alleged Press TV URL.
The rightmost part of the URL, namely ‘Yossi’, doesn’t look accurate. It’s too short. Other Press TV URLs starting ‘http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/09/06/’, followed by a number, end with a much longer string, usually containing 4 or 5 words summarising the headline.
The second rightmost part, namely the ‘260069’ after the ‘http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/09/06/’ suggests that if it was posted, then it was posted early in the day. Numbers for other articles I’ve found for 6 Sep 2012 range from 260077 to 260213.
It’s well known that Indymedia are spooked up to the nines (in fact, they have been since the very beginning) and they don’t like anyone saying anything against Israel, except maybe that they should improve their human rights policy (!)
I have come across articles in major news sources which implicate Israel in terror attacks and which are very quickly removed, in one case with another article being assigned the same URL as the removed one. So I keep an open mind on this alleged article. If it existed, someone will soon find it and post a screenshot.
Incidentally, Press TV, as well as being used for certain purposes by Iranian intelligence, also put out some stuff recently that I thought sounded as if its source was Larouchie.
Speculation aside, what we know is that intelligence agencies post chaff in cases like this. Remember the two versions of the list that Richard Tomlinson was accused of publishing?
We also know that someone will now have a very nice list of people who have used certain search engines to look for information concerning this alleged article.
I doubt it was the brother, listening to his denial, and coupled with his deceased wives brother stating he was a gently guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly I am inclined to believe him. Additionally it makes no sense to connect him with an obviously well planned attack.
Armed robbery? Unlikely if the family were Middle Class Brits from Tunbridge Wells, almost impossible once you factor in all the connections.
The Iraqis? No, as they simply have enough troubles, internal strife and looking after their own backs to send out a team to do this – they also lack the competence and even co-ordination – FFS the country is in total disarray – completely unrealistic.
UK/US? No – they could have done this far more discreetly and with no mess and in so many ways far closer to home with little comeback. Also I doubt they would gain any advantage and huge potential losses. I would find it almost impossible to believe they would shoot/beat a child either.
This leaves likely Israel/Iran. Going by the planning Israel put into the Hamas Dubai killing I think one can assume they are extremely competent and they know exactly what they are doing. This discounts their involvement in what looks like a messy state of affairs. But they are targeting Iranian Nuclear Scientists (and our man was likely sympathetic). If I were a betting man though I’d err on the side of caution here.
Iran? They don’t have a history of this sort of thing as far as I know. As such I find it hard to believe.
Retired RAF Officer? Probably straight up. But why did it take him 10 minutes to call the services after finding them? 10 minutes is a HUGE amount of time. Did he make any calls before calling the emergency services?
Whoever did this obviously wanted to send a message, else, a bomb under the car/car accident (for example) would be a far easier and less troublesome scenario. But message to whom?
The location of the attack was I reckon meticulously planned out to allow a quick exit and with little or no witnesses at short notice as I think our man only decided a few days before the trip to go on holiday to somewhere he’d never been before. Was he meeting handlers who turned out to be his assassins?
This is truly a bizarre case.
When I first tried the URL and got “not found”, I assumed it had maybe been accidentally truncated during cut and paste. But then I couldn’t find it with a search.
Curiously a google search for that URL earlier showed it quoted nowhere at all on the net any more but it was still in my history. It seemed to be immediately after it was posted to Indymedia that the thread was pulled.
I thought I saw the text of the alleged article (rather than the summary now posted) but if I did see that somewhere, I can’t find it now.
“IMHO Sylvain was also a target, and the hit happened at a meet.”
This might explain why (e.g.) the Israelis waited until the two men met to kill both of them rather than killing al Hilli on his own in the UK – if al Hilli was a double agent working for Iran. Maybe they wanted to confirm that they were meeting and exchanging information before they took action. They may have killed the entire family (as they thought) as a warning to others thinking of doing the same. It’s not necessarily a messy operation if the eight year old was down with three skull fractures and they assumed she was dead. And didn’t know about the four year old in the back of the car, or maybe didn’t care about her too much.
The only fly in the ointment for them would have been the impending arrival of the ex-RAF man – but they got away anyway, without being identified. So they’d be happy enough. Were they taken to Geneva airport by helicopter by General Yossi Ben Hanan? He had three extra passengers in his helicopter when he left? That would allow for two in a car and one on a motobike.
The four year old claims not to know the older Swedish woman. But it’s not impossible that the grandmother (assuming it was a grandmother) hadn’t met the family for 3-4 years. If she had met the family when the four year old was only one, the four year old wouldn’t remember.
I searched yesterday on PressTV for “Annecy”, “France” “shooting” etc and found absolutely nothing.
“But why did it take him 10 minutes to call the services after finding them?”
He’s supposed to have been staunching the eight-year-old’s bleeding and making sure her airways were open. And then there’s the business about him smashing a window and turning off the engine.
From the rear wheel it looks like the driver was frantically trying to reverse. The road doesn’t go anywhere (only suitable for bikes and walkers) so he could only escape in one direction.
@Anon
Yes, truncation could be it, but it would be extremely unusual for a Press TV URL of this kind to contain the name of someone who is not much better known than Ben Hanan. I looked at several for the given date, and the only name I found of any kind was “Blair”!
This looks fake.
But my training says to keep an open mind! 🙂
Does anyone reading this believe that they saw the Press TV page referred to?
If so, please get it out of your cache and save it, preferably as .mht, post it somewhere, and post a link to it here.
(BTW according to Haaretz, Hanan is chief of the Israeli Defence Ministry’s delegations across Europe.)
@ Anon:
If there was no mobile phone coverage at the site, who did the ex RAF Officer manage to call the ambulance for the injured girl?
SEMAPHORE
I was thinking this afternoon about this tragic family and that if we in the West had not inflicted sanctions and multiple wars on Iraq and other countries in the region for decades on end, and if we had not armed Saddam, Mr Al Hilli and his wife and young family might be leading a fulfilled life in Baghdad.
This garbage was in the Guardian today.
‘Did the Iraq Dossier Damage Democracy?’
Charles Falconer: ‘Part of the issue about the use of force in Iraq is that, ultimately, we didn’t have a consensus in the country to support it, and once force was used against the wishes of a huge section of civic society, all the things said before became a proxy for going to war with a divided nation. It’s the price you pay for going to war without proper support.’
Yes, to hell with democracy…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/07/did-iraq-dossier-damage-democracy
Related:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/12/iraq-dossier-case-for-war
Thanks N and all for the detailed feedback.
It is extremely odd the presstv have gone silent on this. Unless the rumour is true about an Iranian hit following Mossad informing them of a situation brewing. There is no doubt an experienced team did it, and my bet is a Kidon team based in Europe. It certainly looks to me like a rendezvous and an ambush, and I think there were two targets, SAH and Sylvain.
I also note the Swedish press seems unconcerned that an alleged Swedish citizen, (possibly two) has been assassinated in France if the name Al-Allaf is correct.
“I would find it almost impossible to believe they would shoot/beat a child either.” Durak, 8th Sept 2012, 7:33pm.
Everything in your excellent post makes sense, I think. But surely, hired assassins/ex-Special Forces mercenaries will kill anyone they need to/are paid to, regardless. Think of how they operate in Africa and elsewhere. What I mean is, those who operate as hired killers for the USA/UK/all other countries are pretty similar to one another – sometimes they are acting for one state, then another, then another. They are all a bunch of [insert syncretic multilingual expletive of choice and make it bloody, won’t you?] It’s not ‘Munich’ (the film) where the girl picks up the bomb/’phone and the (after all, they have a heart) MOSSAD operatives stop. These people, for example, massacre entire villages and then blame it on some other grouping. They are the Tonton Macoute.
I wouldn’t take it as necessarily true that the unnamed ‘ex-RAF’ guy was on a bicycle.
Either as a member of a protection unit, or as a member of the assassination team, he may have got stranded in the area solely because of a fuck-up.
If he was Brit special forces, that would explain why he hasn’t been named.
It would also explain why he had, er, a better than usual communications capability.
Not that I necessarily believe that last bit. If someone is interested in checking the mobile phone issue, why not go to the main French phone companies’ websites and check for coverage at those coordinates?
The thing about 10 minutes before the call to emergency services might be one of those details that in the end proves not strictly correct. If he was running around checking firstly that it was safe to approach, then secondly, on all the people to see if they were alive and needed CPR, etc. and trying to save the girl, it might well have taken him a few minutes – experienced ex-military, possibly used in the past to dealing with battlefield trauma – to call. Maybe he was screaming for help, who knows? Then, who knows, maybe he had difficulty getting a signal. We don’t know. I wouldn’t read too much into, or get tied-up in, these details.
The key question, it seems to me, is, precisely what was Mr Al Hilli working on and what connections might he have had?
Even if you cant get phone signal in areas does the emrgency services number not always work?
If someone has the exact coords please post them. I can get the approximate area on google earth but not the exact location. Looks like they were in a valley with steep sides and there are almost no user submitted photos on Google Earth on that road which suggests to me that there is no cellphone coverage. Lots of photos posted higher up the sides of the valley though. If there is no coverage at the location, my guess is there would be within half a mile of the site going by the lay of the land.
But it would be helpful to have the confirmed coordinates rather than my best guess based on media reports.
Jives,
Emergency calls need a network operator. It need not be your own though. Given the layout of the land I can quite believe there are blackspots with no coverage from any operator.
The key question, it seems to me, is, precisely what was Mr Al Hilli working on and what connections might he have had?
I have posted all this information and it is still awaiting moderation.
Thanks for clearing that up Anon.
Al Hilli worked for AMS 1087, in Swindon Aeral Drones and photography…get the picture now?
[link to http://www.pinkfishmedia.net]
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 11634244
It’s alleged that…
He was set up by Mi6 in 2007 in a front company called AMS1087 which did aircraft based photography. They were based at the Delta office park in Wiltshire which is built on part of the old ‘Turnstile’ nuclear Command and Control bunker and is still owned by the MoD. He was loaned RAF trainer aircraft at no cost to help him get established as well as pilots and because of these advantages his company originally thrived however once he started to visit Iran in late 2010 he lost a lot of (MoD supplied) private contracts and the business almost collapsed.
and
In an unprecedented action the British Embassy in Paris has sent a twenty person team to the crime scene headed by Kara Owen the deputy British ambassador. According to local TV station ‘Demain’ people describe the British Embassy staff as being “military type”.
EDIT. Apparently already the subject of a D notice ie
No mention of his links to the Security Services
No mention of his links to Iran
No mention of his links to nuclear weapons research
No speculation regarding Israel involvement in the killing
Be interesting to see what tonight’s news is able to say…
Anders77777,
Mod Jon said in the “Derailed” thread that there would be a period where there would probably be no mods around for a bit today so to be patient if waiting for an auto moderated post to be released. Simple things like more than one link in a post cause it to be automatically queued.
Fwiw, I spent some time walking in that area one summer about 25 years ago, and the majority of people I met were British or American – to the point where I started greeting people in English rather than French. So don’t read too much into the fact that there was a British cyclist close by. I’m not sure of the odds of him being ex-services, though.
Fascinating essay. Usual prefix.
http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/article05.html
“Surrey Space Technologies, Ltd. (SSTL), in England, is considered to be the market leader in microsatellite technology. SSTL is a commercial, majority owned subsidiary of the University of Surrey. SSTL has conducted technology transfer and training programs with a goal of enabling emerging space nations to master microsatellite technology as a step in facilitating the development and deployment of an increasingly capable national space infrastructure. To date SSTL has conducted technology transfer and training programs with: China (Tsinghua-1), South Korea (KITSat-1/2), Portugal (PoSat-1), Pakistan (BADR-1), Chile (FASat-Alfa/Bravo), South Africa (UoSAT-3/4/5), Thailand (TMSAT-1), Singapore (Merlion payload), and Malaysia (TiungSAT-1). Recently, SSTL conducted a satellite inspection mission with the Russians and Chinese using the 6.5 kg SNAP-1 nanosat. In addition to SSTL, other countries involved in maturing microsat technology include: Russia, Israel, Canada, Sweden, and Australia.”
Thanks, I probably hit some trigger words.
I don’t think people here are fully aware of the stuff SAH and Sylvain did, tbh.