A 24-year-old man is suspected of having shot and killed his wife and their granddaughter on Sunday in Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d'Armor) before turning the weapon against him, for a reason still unknown, according to the first elements of the investigation.
“We are indeed facing a family drama,”
explained at the end of the evening to an AFP journalist on the spot the public prosecutor of Saint-Brieuc, Nicolas Heitz.
The police had been notified shortly before 4 p.m. by neighbors who heard detonations in a small building located away from the city center.
“From the first scenario, it appears that the 24-year-old man used a rifle to fire in an order we do not know at his wife, his 22-year-old wife, and their daughter who is a 3-year-old child. and a half”
, he detailed.
The police also discovered an injured 59-year-old lady in the apartment, who could be
"the mother-in-law of the deceased"
according to the magistrate.
She was immediately transported to Brest hospital.
"Whoever could be the author of the shots turned the weapon against him, a priori, by killing himself,"
he explained by telephone at the end of the afternoon.
The firearm used is of the
"long gun"
type , according to him.
"We do not know the circumstances in which the facts took place and what may be the reason for this tragedy
," he added on Sunday evening.
Monday autopsies
The investigation was entrusted to the Saint-Brieuc police station, which had not yet heard any witnesses on Sunday evening, according to the prosecutor who immediately went there.
“The investigation has only just begun
,” he insisted.
The judicial identity of the Rennes police moved on Sunday afternoon and the bodies were taken away at the end of the evening, according to the AFP journalist.
The three bodies will be autopsied on Monday at the Rennes forensic institute, added the magistrate, who plans to give a press conference in the coming days.
The scene of the tragedy is located in a quiet street, in a district located in the western suburbs of the Côtes-d'Armor prefecture, away from the city center.
The apartment in question is in a three-storey building from the 1980s of the HLM type.
Several feminicides and infanticides have bereaved Brittany in recent months.
At the end of October, a man, his wife and their two daughters were found dead in their house in Carantec (Finistère).
Autopsies of the woman and her two little girls revealed that they had been asphyxiated, while the father was found hanged.
At the end of November, in Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande, near Rennes, the bodies of a couple and their 25-year-old daughter were discovered in a pavilion, in what could be a double homicide followed by a father's suicide.