Elderly Alps victim was Swiss

Gendarmes block access to a killing site near Chevaline, French Alps.

Gendarmes block access to a killing site near Chevaline, French Alps.

Published Sep 6, 2012

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Stockholm - The Swedish foreign ministry said Thursday that the elder woman killed in a shooting in the French Alps was a Swedish national, information initially released by a French prosecutor.

“The information provided in France is correct. She is Swedish. We are waiting for the end of the identification process to issue an official confirmation,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Linn Duvhammar said.

She refused to disclose the woman's identity, pending the official confirmation which she said could be announced later Thursday.

The woman's family in Sweden was to be informed by police on Thursday, she said.

Four people were killed in a mystery shooting Wednesday in the French Alps, three of them shot in the head in what the prosecutor in charge of the case Thursday called an act of “extreme savagery.”

Three of the victims were found in a British-registered BMW estate car, while the fourth was a French cyclist who arrived at the scene by chance.

Two young sisters survived the shooting, the elder of whom has been placed in an induced coma ahead of further surgery in a hospital in Grenoble.

The girl had been shot in the shoulder and suffered multiple and “extremely violent” blows to the head.

Police sources have confirmed that the car belonged to Saad al-Hilli, a 50-year-old born in Iraq but resident in Surrey in the southeast of England.

A younger woman, thought to be al-Hilli's wife, was carrying an Iraqi passport. - Sapa-AFP

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