Cambodia bodies identified as missing French family

Cambodian police officials examine human remains on the propery of widower Laurent Vallier in Kampong Speu province, some 45 kilometers west of Phnom Penh in January 2012. DNA tests have revealed that the five bodies found were of Laurent Vallier and his four children, the French embassy said on April 4.

5/04/2012
AFP

DNA tests have confirmed that the remains of five people found in a submerged car in Cambodia in January are those of a Frenchman and his four young children, embassy officials said Thursday.

The Cambodian government has agreed to send the skeletal remains to France for "additional examination" by forensics experts, the French embassy in Phnom Penh said in a statement.

No cause of death has been determined yet for widower Laurent Vallier, 42, and his young children.

The family's badly decomposed bodies were discovered inside Vallier's white 4x4 vehicle after it was retrieved from a large pond behind his house in southern Kampong Speu province on January 14.

"We are still investigating the case," provincial police chief Keo Pisey told AFP.

Judicial inquiries into the deaths have been launched in France and Cambodia.

Vallier and his two sons and two daughters, thought to have been aged from two to nine, had been missing since September. Vallier's Cambodian wife died in childbirth in 2009.

"I believe my son-in-law and my grandchildren would not have committed suicide. I believe they were murdered," the late Frenchman's Cambodian father-in-law Tith Chhuon told AFP.

"I would also like to appeal to authorities and the holy spirits to find justice for them."

Vallier, who according to his relatives worked as a tour guide, is understood to have moved from France to Cambodia around 12 years ago, arriving in Kampong Speu in 2007.

When police pulled his car out of the water they said they found several bones inside an open suitcase, having apparently drifted in there over time as the vehicle is thought to have lain submerged for weeks.

An urn was also among the items recovered from the muddied car and relatives said it appeared to be the same one that contained the ashes of Vallier's wife.