Collective suicide: French family’s group jump from building reminds Burari deaths

A French family reportedly obsessed with conspiracy theories jumped one after the other from their seventh-floor apartment in the Swiss town of Montreux, recalling the mysterious incident of Burari deaths in which 11 members of family hanged themselves inside their residence.

Swiss police launched a thorough investigation into the mystery of the apparently ‘collective suicide’ of a French family in which four members killed themselves while a 15-year-old boy survived the tragedy last Thursday but he is in a coma in a stable condition in the hospital.

The incident had taken place in the plush town on Lake Geneva in Montreux.

According to Al-Jazeera, a man – aged 40, his 41-year-old wife, her twin sister, the couple’s eight-year-old daughter and their boy plunged more than 20 metres from the apartment, where they all lived “withdrawn from society”.

Timeline of events

Investigators said two officers knocked on the apartment door at 6:15am (04:15 GMT), wanting to speak with the father about the home-schooling arrangements for his son.

A voice asked who was at the door, but then said nothing further. Unable to enter, the officers left.

Shortly before 7:00am (05:00 GMT), all five jumped from the balcony within the space of five minutes.

Police detected no trace of a struggle, seemingly confirming that they jumped of their own accord. A step ladder was found on the balcony.

“Before or during the events, no witnesses, including the two police officers present on the spot from 6:15 am and the passers-by at the foot of the building, heard the slightest noise or cry coming from the apartment or the balcony,” police said.

“Technical investigations show no warning signs of such an act,” they added, noting however that “since the start of the pandemic, the family was very interested in conspiracy and survivalist theories.”

The family lived in virtual self-sufficiency having amassed a well-organised stockpile of various food, taking up much of their living space but enabling them to see out a major crisis.

Only the mother’s twin sister worked outside the home, while neither the mother nor the eight-year-old girl, who did not attend school, were registered with the local authorities.

“All these elements suggest … fear of the authorities interfering in their lives,” the police statement said.

Police probe

The Vaud regional police announced on Tuesday that their findings “make it possible to rule out the intervention of a third party and suggest that all the victims jumped from the balcony one after the other”.

Police and prosecutors are working on the theory of “collective suicide”.

Granddaughters of Algerian writer

France’s Journal du Dimanche newspaper said the father, Eric David, grew up in a wealthy part of Marseille and attended the Ecole Polytechnique, one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

The twin sisters, Nasrine and Narjisse Feraoun, grew up in a family of five children, all educated at the elite Lycee Henri-IV in Paris, the weekly said. The mother was a dentist and her sister an ophthalmologist.

The newspaper also said the twins were granddaughters of Algerian novelist Mouloud Feraoun.

A close friend of the French philosopher Albert Camus, Feraoun was assassinated in Algiers in 1962 by a far-right French pro-colonial group.

Relevance with Burari deaths

It was one of the most intriguing police cases in the capital that took place in June 2021, a proper whodunit that perplexed many for a long time and gave rise to many conspiracy theories and dark tales.

Delhi Police’s Crime Branch finally brought a closure to the case involving the deaths of 11 members of the Chundawat family in north Delhi’s Burari by declaring in its closure report that no sign of foul play was detected and the deaths appeared the result of a family suicide pact, stated an article published by Times of India in October 2021.

Suicide pact

The cops had registered a case of murder, but a detailed, three-year investigation concluded that this was a case of a suicide pact. Police submitted the closure report to the court on June 11. The court will take up the matter at the next hearing in November.

The bodies of the 11 family members were discovered on the morning of July 1, 2018. While the body of Narayan Devi was found on the floor, the others were all discovered hanging from an iron grille, blindfolded and the hands and feet tied. Besides Devi, the other dead were her sons Bhavnesh and Lalit, daughter Pratibha, Bhavnesh’s wife Savita and their children Nitu, Monu and Dhruv, Lalit’s wife Teena and son Shivam and Pratibha’s daughter Priyanka.

Police had recovered a diary from inside the house that appeared to describe the manner in which the family members were to hang themselves. The information matched the circumstances in which the bodies were discovered. In August 2019, a handwriting analysis confirmed that the entries in the diary were made by the occupants of the house. Mobile forensics also established the use of the mobile phones by the different members of the Chundawat family.

Several pieces of evidence hinted strongly at the death being the result of a suicide pact. A source said, “The family members put their mobile phones on silent mode and stowed them collectively in the bag in the mandir in the house. The diary entries and the manner of their hanging also suggested they were involved in some sort of a ritual. The handwriting analysis determined that most of the diary entries were made by Priyanka and Lalit. CCTV footage also showed no other person entering the house on the day of the incident besides the occupants.”

While the psychological autopsy revealed that the 11 might not have intended to die but expected to return to normal life after a certain ritual, the viscera reports ruled out ingestion of poison.

The diary entries indicated that Lalit firmly believed his father, Bhopal Singh who died in 2007, was communicating with him and asking him to perform certain rituals that would benefit the entire family.

A Netflix India movie showed the timeline of events of the shocking case of 11 deaths last year.

It was captioned, “Watch House of Secrets, a docuseries that investigates the complex realities behind the Burari deaths.”