Alps murder mystery: wife's ex died on same day. Coincidence?

Latest twist in al-Hilli investigation: Iqbal was married before - and the man died hours after she was shot

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

Did the al-Hilli family, murdered in the French Alps on 5 September 2012 by a gunman who has never been found, die because 47-year-old Iqbal al-Hilli's first husband, an American who neither her friends nor family knew about, ordered her killing?

That is the extraordinary – and, it has to be admitted, fanciful - possibility put forward this week after it was revealed that Iqbal had been previously married in her early 30s to an oil worker called James Thompson and that Thompson died near his home in Mississippi on the very same day that Iqbal, her husband Saad and her mother Suhaila were gunned down in the woods near Lake Annecy.

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Jack Bremer is a London-based reporter, attached to The Week.co.uk. He has reported regularly from the United States and France.