A rare Luger pistol of the same type used to kill a British family in the French Alps in 2012 has been recovered by police divers from the bottom of Lake Annecy, close to where the killings took place. Saad Al-Hilli, his wife Iqbal, her mother Suhaila, and French cyclist Sylvain Mollier were all shot dead in the attack, which remains unsolved 14 years on and shocked Europe at the time. The discovery has renewed hope that forensic advances could finally help identify the killer, even though the case has long been hampered by conflicting theories and a botched initial investigation.

The weapon found is a Luger PO6/29, a rare Swiss military sidearm, matching fragments recovered from the original crime scene and later traced to a 1935 batch of just 940 such pistols. French cold case investigators in Nanterre plan to compare the newly found gun with the original fragments and examine its serial number, while acknowledging that 14 years underwater will make forensic analysis difficult, though DNA recovery from submerged items is no longer considered impossible. The 2012 attack saw 21 shots fired in under two minutes, with the Al-Hillis' young daughter Zainab injured and her sister Zeena escaping by hiding in the car; theories about the killer's identity, including a mysterious camper and a former Swiss soldier, have never been confirmed.