© Laurent Cipriani/AP Flowers on the crime scene four people were killed in the French Alps. The French press treated the story as small in comparison to front-page headlines on British pages.
For the French press, the murder of a British family and a French cyclist on the edge of an Alpine forest was what is known as a "fait divers", a term mostly used to describe a trivial miscellaneous news item.
Reports of the multiple killing emerged well in time for newspaper deadlines on both sides of the Channel. However, it made front-page headlines on Thursday only in Britain.
Libération, the leading leftwing daily newspaper, carried a short report on page 14 under the headline: "Unexplained carnage in Haute-Savoie", while its rival, the right-of-centre Le Figaro relegated the story to page 8. Even on Friday, when one of the victims had been identified as a local Frenchman, father-of-three Sylvain Mollier, who happened to be cycling past when he was gunned down, only the local papers and the national tabloid Aujourd'hui put the story on the front page.
"The English Press Goes Wild", wrote Aujourd'hui in an article inside. The paper noted that the "presse Outre-Manche" had "above all been sarcastic about the gendarmerie's methods and its incredible naivety" because it took investigators eight hours before discovering four-year-old Zeena al-Hilli in the car.
However, the paper added, such distrust was not entirely surprising given that France was scarred by "several legal or investigative fiascos after the murder of British citizens on French soil".
Unlike their newspaper colleagues, French broadcast media have been all over the story.
On its website BFM TV reported the British press's "race for information", but conceded it was the British media that had come up with the first photographs of the dead man, his car and details of the family.
The French viewed the descent en masse of Her Majesty's press on Chevaline and Annecy with incredulity that, as the days passed, turned into a mix of astonishment and admiration.
British journalists' insatiable appetite for detail appeared to perplex public prosecutor Eric Maillaud, who nevertheless remained unfailingly polite and patient despite having had five hours sleep in three days.
"Why is that important?" he replied, more than once at the daily press conferences.
When asked about what witnesses may or may not have seen, he could only reply, with more than a hint of exasperation: "Maybe some people saw Martians. I really don't know."
I’m a contract worker & on Monday 10th Sept I was contacted by an agency telling me that there is a contract available at Surrey Satellite [where Mr al-Hilli worked]... I almost dropped the phone when he said the name of the company, might just be coincidence but I’m really not sure what to make of all this. As for news, it has gone a bit quiet on the story here in the UK too.