Police hunt father after wife and four children shot dead

POLICE hunting a father suspected of shooting dead his wife and four children and burying them in the garden have turned their attention southwards after his car was found.

Officers made the gruesome discovery of the corpses in the northwestern town of Nantes, but switched the hunt to the Riviera, 770 kilometres south after tracing the use of the suspect’s bank card.

The suspect withdrew cash in Roquebrune-sur-Argens outside Frejus a week ago, and yesterday police found the missing car, a metallic blue Citroen C5, outside a hotel where he is now thought to have stayed on April 14.

Forensic investigators were at the scene, a small town in the Var region, in which the family had once lived in the 1990s before moving north to Brittany.

Detectives were studying tapes from video surveillance cameras that confirmed he had been at the scene, and conducting a fingerprint search of the room in the Formule 1 budget hotel and of the car.

On Thursday, police in Nantes found five bodies buried in a trench under the terrace of the family’s townhouse, around three weeks after the family told their children’s school they were emigrating to Australia.

The Nantes prosecutor said that shortly before the disappearance the father, 50-year-old small businessman Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes, made bizarre claims to friends to be a US secret agent heading into a witness protection programme.

Autopsies will confirm the identities of the victims and the cause of death.

Neighbours described them as an ordinary middle-class family with no history of crime or odd behaviour. Agnes worked as a teaching assistant and volunteered in her local Catholic church.

The older sons, 20-year-old Arthur and 18-year-old Thomas, were students, while 16-year-old daughter Anne and 13-year-old Benoit attended a fee-paying private Catholic school, la Perverie Sacre Coeur.