4-year-old girl found alive after hours beneath her family’s bodies in French Alps killings

Amazingly, after a British family was slain in a mysterious French Alps shooting, a 4 year-old child has been discovered hiding under the bodies of her mother and grandmother in the backseat. Police had already been on scene for hours before the discovery. Her sister, 7, is the only other remaining survivor. She is seriously injured and hospitalized. The 4 year-old is said to be uninjured.

Immobilized with fear, a 4-year-old British girl huddled for eight hours beneath the legs of her slain mother in the back of a car filled with corpses on a remote Alpine road — all while French investigators stood nearby, unaware the girl was there.The stunning discovery Thursday of the girl, apparently unharmed, heightened the drama around a mysterious shooting rampage that left four adults dead and a 7-year-old girl hospitalized with bullet wounds and skull fractures. The reason for the killing, in a wooded area near the village of Chevaline, remains unclear.

A cyclist stumbled across the grisly scene Wednesday, and police arrived to find a man’s body in the front seat and two women in the back, and a dead cyclist with no known ties to the other victims nearby. The 7-year-old girl was discovered near the car with bullet wounds and skull fractures and was hospitalized, Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud said. Her identity was unclear.

French authorities struggled to explain why the 4-year-old wasn’t discovered earlier and was left for hours alone on the back seat of a car with two corpses, apparently those of her mother and grandmother.

Maillaud said, “we discovered a little 4-year-old girl that no one noticed earlier because she wasn’t moving. Probably terrified, she was completely immobile among the bodies. She was later examined and she is doing okay.

“She is in a hospital but her life is not threatened despite going through a tragedy by losing her family in such atrocious conditions,” he said.

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