Norbert Falco/Le Dauphine / EPA
French Police officers cordon off the road leading to a gruesome scene where four people were shot dead near Annecy Lake, a popular tourist destination at the foothills of the French Alps.
By NBC News staff and wire reports
Updated at 8:08 p.m. ET: Immobilized with fear, a 4-year-old British girl huddled for eight hours under the skirt of her slain mother in a BMW filled with corpses on a remote road in the French Alps ? while investigators stood nearby, unaware she was there.
Thursday's discovery of the girl, apparently unharmed, heightened the drama surrounding a mysterious shooting rampage that left four adults dead and a 7-year-old girl hospitalized with three bullet wounds and skull fractures. The older girl had been "violently beaten," the Guardian of London reported.
The little girl has started to talk, according to the Guardian.
Prosecutor Eric Maillaud on Thursday described the slayings, in a wooded area near the eastern village of Chevaline, as an act of "gross savagery" and said the scene found by officers was "well beyond television fiction."
The motive remains unclear, and French authorities have not ruled out that this could be the work of a professional hitman. Three of the dead were shot in the center of their foreheads.
"All the possible scenarios have been images -- from the smallest, family drama," Maillaud said. "We have very, very few clues."
All the bodies were found in or near a BMW that prosecutors say belonged to a British family vacationing at a campground on the shores of Lake Annecy, a popular retreat in the French Alps. The owners of the campground told investigators the victims included two parents and a grandmother.
French authorities struggled to explain why the 4-year-old wasn't discovered earlier and was left for hours alone in the back seat of the car.
Said Maillaud, according to France's Liberation newspaper: "Initially, a doctor determined that the people in the car were dead. He went to the bodies, determined they were deceased, and he removed himself. There were clothes, bags, and this little girl who remained rigorously still. Even with a thermal heat detector, this little girl was not detected. The doctors who approached the car could not detect this girl because she was completely hidden."
At a press conference, police said the child was found after other tourists at a camping area where the family had stayed said there were two children -- not one, the Guardian reported.
Police arrived Wednesday to find a man's body in the front seat and two women in the back, and another dead man near a bicycle with no known ties to the other victims nearby.
That fourth victim was French cyclist Sylvain Mollier, 40, who apparently stumbled across the grisly murder, police said. He was shot five times, at least one time in the forehead, le Dauphine Libere reported. He was on paternity leave after having had a third child in June.?
Iraqi-born victim
Investigators identified the driver of the car as Saad al-Hilli, 50, a British citizen and engineer from Surrey, England, who was born in Baghdad and moved to England in 1970, according to the Sipa news agency. Police in Surrey, a largely suburban county southwest of London, said they are talking with French authorities about the case.
Hilli is a respected member of the community, neighbors told British reporters.
"They are quite beautiful kids and so well behaved. He was an extraordinarily nice man and helpful. He was a very tactile loving father. He loved to gather the girls up and cuddle them," Jack Saltman, a neighbor, told the Guardian. "They would go running at him and he'd catch them in his arms and kiss them. He adored them. His wife was a delightful person and I can't think why anybody would want to harm them."
NBC News reported that al-Hilli worked as an engineer in aeronautics.
See full coverage of this story at ITV News
The 7-year-old girl was discovered near the car with bullet wounds and skull fractures and was hospitalized. She was placed in an artificial coma but her life is not in danger, Maillaud said Thursday.
ITV News said al-Hilli?s passport matched the identity of the man who booked into a nearby campsite with his family. The eldest woman has a Swedish passport and has been identified in the British press as grandmother to the two girls.
?Maillaud refused to confirm the al-Hillis' identity.
4 slain in French Alps; girl, possible witness, survives
A second cyclist who discovered all the bodies alerted authorities around 4 p.m. Wednesday. According to the Sun, the cyclist is British and a former member of the British Royal Air Force. When he came across the scene, he first saw the 7-year-old girl and immediately placed her in "recovery position."
He then walked around the car and broke the driver's side window because the engine was still running.
The car was under guard until midnight, when special investigators arrived from the Paris area and found the girl.
"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 OK," Maillaud said Wednesday night.
Girl smiled
Maillaud said as soon as investigators opened the door, the girl emerged, smiled and reached out her arms; she spoke English but couldn't describe what had happened and was taken into police care.
"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.
Several rescue workers had all apparently peered inside the car.
"Firefighters, technicians, doctors looked inside the car through the windows but they didn't see the little girl. The child, terrorized, never moved. She stayed beneath her mother's legs," Lt. Col. Benoit Vinnemann said, according to BFM-TV.
The Frenchman found dead next to the car had no ties to the British family; he was identified only after his wife reported him missing.
"A woman was worried because her husband went to cycle in this area and didn't come back home," Maillaud said. "He was just cycling in that area and got killed along with this British family."
The French newspaper Le Dauphine identified the dead biker as Sylvain Mollier, a 40-year-old father of three on paternity leave from a job at a factory linked to nuclear manufacturer Areva.
About 15 bullet casings were found near the car, Maillaud said.
Police cordoned off the area, combing the forest for potential perpetrators in searches that continued Thursday.
Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague said there had been a "terrible, tragic shooting in France," in a message posted to his personal Twitter account.
"Our thoughts are with the young girls who survived and the family," he wrote.?
The Associated Press contributed to this report. ITV News is the U.K. partner of NBC News.
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