Teen survives as his kid sister, parents and aunt perish in Swiss tragedy; cops blame conspiracy theories

This article is more than 12 months old

Mar 30, 2022 11:52 am

Geneva (AFP) – Five members of a French family, including two children, gripped by conspiracy theories, jumped one after the other from their seventh-storey apartment in the Swiss town of Montreux, police investigating the mystery said on Tuesday (March 29).

Only a 15-year-old boy survived the tragedy last Thursday near the casino in the plush town on Lake Geneva. He was in a coma in a stable condition in hospital.

The Vaud regional police announced that their findings “make it possible to rule out the intervention of a third party and suggest that all the victims jumped from the balcony one after the other”.

Police and prosecutors are working on the theory of “collective suicide”.

A man aged 40, his 41-year-old wife, her twin sister, the couple’s eight-year-old daughter and the boy plunged more than 20m from the apartment, where they all lived “withdrawn from society”, according to police.

Investigators said two officers knocked on the apartment door at 6.15am that day, wanting to speak with the father about the home-schooling arrangements for his son.

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A voice asked who was at the door, but then said nothing further.

Unable to enter, the officers left.

Shortly before 7am, all five jumped from the balcony within the space of five minutes.

Police detected no trace of a struggle, seemingly confirming that they jumped of their own accord.

A step-ladder was found on the balcony.

“Before or during the events, no witnesses, including the two police officers present on the spot from 6.15am and passers-by at the foot of the building, heard the slightest noise or cry coming from the apartment or the balcony,” police said.

“Technical investigations show no warning signs of such an act,” they added, noting however that “since the start of the pandemic, the family was very interested in conspiracy and survivalist theories”.

The family lived in virtual self-sufficiency having amassed a well-organised stockpile of various food, taking up much of their living space but enabling them to see out a major crisis.

Only the mother’s twin sister worked outside the home, while neither the mother nor the eight-year-old girl, who did not attend school, were registered with the local authorities.

“All these elements suggest... fear of the authorities interfering in their lives,” the police statement said.

France’s Journal du Dimanche newspaper said the father, Eric David, grew up in a wealthy part of Marseille and attended the Ecole Polytechnique, one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

The twin sisters, Nasrine and Narjisse Feraoun, grew up in a family of five children who were all educated at the elite Lycee Henri-IV in Paris, the weekly said.

The mother was a dentist and her sister an ophthalmologist.

The newspaper also said the twins were granddaughters of Algerian novelist Mouloud Feraoun. A close friend of the French writer Albert Camus, Feraoun was assassinated in Algiers in 1962 by a far-right French pro-colonial group.