“She is being looked after and we are doing everything we possibly can to care for her.”
The family had been staying at the nearby Saint Jorioz camp site, where fellow campers who reported their disappearance on Wednesday evening had described them as being of Middle Eastern appearance.
Chevaline and the surrounding area on the shores of Lake Annecy is popular with tourists, including many Britons.
French authorities said the victims were discovered by a passing cyclist around 3:50pm on Wednesday. The cyclist who was killed had overtaken him minutes earlier.
Several witnesses reported seeing a car speeding away from the scene around the time the attack took place.
Experts from the national gendarmerie’s IRCGN unit collected DNA evidence from the scene and were checking spent bullet cartridges in an attempt to identify the weapons used.
Local police defended the decisions that led to the four-year-old being left in the car for so long.
“We had instructions not to enter the car and not to move the bodies,” Lieutenant-Colonel Benoit Vinnemann of the local gendarmerie told AFP.
The gendarmes were unable to open the doors of the family’s BMW for fear that bullet-pierced windows would shatter, potentially compromising the work of the IRCGN forensic team.
“Firemen, technicians and doctors all looked into the car through the holes in the windows but none of them saw the girl,” Vinnemann added.
A helicopter equipped with a thermal camera took images of the car to check if there were any other bodies inside but also failed to identify the girl. “She was so close to her mother they appeared as one mass,” said Vinnemann.
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