French 'fugitive' arrested over 2011 family massacre is case of mistaken identity
It was hailed as the end of an eight-year manhunt that had gripped France: one of the country's most wanted fugitives, who vanished without a trace following the massacre of his family, had been captured at Glasgow airport.
But little more than 12 hours later, the supposed arrest of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was instead the subject of a cross-channel blame game. The man in custody was not in fact the 58-year-old suspected of murdering his wife and four children in 2011, but an entirely innocent 70-year-old travelling to visit his Scottish spouse.
It was an embarrassing backtrack for French authorities, who had extensively briefed the country's media that they had at last got their man. The fingerprints matched the elusive aristocratic businessman, sources said in reports that led French TV news bulletins and were splashed across newspapers.
The unsuspecting Parisian, reported by AFP to be a man of Portuguese origin with French and British nationality, bore little resemblance to the much younger suspect. But that had been explained away by police sources, who told French paper Liberation that Dupont de Ligonnès had undergone plastic surgery to disguise himself.
After doubts emerged, quickly confirmed by a DNA test, another round of briefings began. Some French police sources suggested their Scottish counterparts had given them a mistaken impression of the evidence.
One highly placed police source told Le Parisien: “The Scots told us repeatedly: ‘It’s your man. The fingerprints match.' They did not use the conditional tense.”
The source claimed that the Scottish police refused to send the fingerprints to Paris and it was only when French detectives went to Glasgow that they realised that it was only a “partial” match, with only five of 13 key points appearing identical.
However, the Scottish police's statement on Friday had said only that a suspect had been arrested, without giving further details.
A source at Police Scotland told The Telegraph on Saturday that they had never confirmed the man's identity, suggesting it was in fact French authorities who had jumped the gun.
"I think it's a wee bit too early to say we have made the mistake," the source said.
The case of mistaken identity was yet another red herring in the hunt for Dupont de Ligonnès, which has transfixed France for eight years.
Hundreds of reported sightings have added to the mystery. Police raided a monastery last year after he was reportedly seen in the area. They also searched underground caves and disused potassium mines near the southern village of Roquebrune-sur-Argens, where he was last seen, filmed on CCTV leaving a budget hotel and walking off into the countryside with a rucksack and what appeared to be a shotgun on his back.
The aristocrat, who would have been a count if not for the French Revolution, vanished after allegedly burying the bodies of his wife Agnès, 48, and children Benoît, 13, Anne, 16, Tomas, 18 and Arthur, 20, under the patio of their elegant townhouse in the western city of Nantes. Beside them were the bodies of their two pet Labradors, Léon and Jules.
De Ligonnès left contradictory messages to explain his family’s disappearance, telling his children’s school that he was going to work in Australia. He informed another school, where his wife worked as an assistant, that she had been hospitalised for gastroenteritis. He told acquaintances that he was a US agent and was going into witness protection because he had testified in a big drugs case.
In fact, he managed online businesses and had severe financial difficulties.
