CHEVALINE, Sept 7: Police investigating a gruesome family murder in the French Alps are looking at several theories, including that the British man shot dead in his car with his wife and another woman was involved in a financial feud with his brother.

As forensics experts performed autopsies on the four victims, who include a local cyclist who was passing at the time of the attack, a team of French investigators landed in Britain.

A state prosecutor confirmed the people killed in the car were a couple from Britain — on a camping holiday in the Annecy region with their two daughters — and an older woman.

The girls, aged seven and four, survived and are under police protection in hospital after the shootings on a remote forest road near the village of Chevaline on Wednesday.

Prosecutor Eric Maillaud identified the dead car driver as Saad al-Hilli, an Iraqi-born Briton. He said Hilli's four-year-old daughter — who hid for eight hours with the bodies in the car, too scared to move — had confirmed she had been with her parents and sister when the attack took place. “She said, 'It's my father', she gave his first name, 'It's my mother', she gave her first name, 'It's my sister',” Maillaud told a news conference in the town of Annecy, near Chevaline.

The older girl was badly beaten in the attack. Maillaud cautioned that a tip-off to British authorities that Hilli and his brother were involved in a money dispute was “an interesting line of investigation, but one among many”.

“Just because there is a dispute between two brothers doesn't make him the No. 1 suspect,” said Maillaud, adding: “No lead, no information is considered far-fetched.”

MOVING CHAT: He said the brother had not been formally questioned, but had sought out British authorities after learning that Hilli may have been killed in France, and added that he understood the brother had denied any dispute with Hilli.

Maillaud said investigators had gleaned little from their “moving” chat on Friday with the four-year-old girl, who is in a psychiatric hospital in the city of Grenoble, accompanied by a nurse and British embassy staff. He said authorities were searching for family members to whom she could be entrusted.

Police hope Hilli's seven-year-old daughter, who was in an artificial coma in a Grenoble hospital awaiting a second operation for serious skull fractures, will be able to eventually provide more information.

“We have someone, or some people, who clearly wanted to kill and who had no fear about taking lives,” Maillaud said, adding that each victim had been shot at least three times, and at least once in the head.

The family's relationship to the older woman killed in the car, who had a Swedish passport, has not yet been established. Shocked neighbours of Hilli in rural Surrey, south of London, described the family as friendly and normal.

Well-wishers piled floral bouquets outside the family home.

COMMITTED ENGINEER: Hilli was a mechanical engineer who contracted with Surrey Satellite Technology, the company, a subsidiary of aerospace and defence firm EADS, said on Friday. It described him as a “an experienced and committed engineer”. —Reuters