Updated at 10:52 p.m. ET: Immobilized with fear, a 4-year-old British girl huddled for eight hours under her slain mother's skirt in a car filled with corpses in a remote area at the foothills of the French Alps — while investigators stood nearby, unaware she was there.

Thursday's discovery of the girl, apparently unharmed, heightened the drama surrounding a mysterious shooting rampage that left four adults dead and a 7-year-old girl hospitalized with three bullet wounds and skull fractures. The older girl had been "violently beaten," the Guardian of London reported.

Around 4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, a British cyclist cruising uphill came across a chilling scene: A BMW, its engine running, had three people dead inside. Nearby was a dead cyclist -- the British cyclist recognized him because he passed him on the road. Outside the car, a 7-year-old girl was gravely wounded and appeared to have been beaten.

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The British cyclist, who, according to the Sun had been in the Royal Air Force, immediately placed the 7-year-old girl in "recovery position." He then walked around the car and broke the driver's side window to turn off the car.

The motive for these slayings remains unclear, and French authorities have not ruled out that this could be the work of a professional hitman. Three of the dead were shot in the forehead with a semi-automatic weapon -- which means the shooter had to pull the trigger for every shot. About 15 bullet casings were found near the car.

"All the possible scenarios have been images -- from the smallest, family drama," Prosecutor Eric Maillaud said, according to French media. "We have very, very few clues."

Maillaud described the slayings, in a wooded area near the southeastern village of Chevaline, as an act of "gross savagery." He said the scene found by officers was "well beyond television fiction."

Of the four dead, three were in the car, believed to be a British-Iraqi family vacationing at a campground on the shores of Lake Annecy, a popular retreat in the French Alps. The owners of the campground told investigators that the victims included two parents and a grandmother.

Investigators identified the driver of the car as Saad al-Hilli, 50, a British citizen and engineer from Surrey, England, who was born in Baghdad and moved to England in 1970, according to the Sipa news agency. Police in Surrey, a largely suburban county southwest of London, said they are talking with French authorities about the case.

Hilli is a respected member of the community, neighbors told British reporters.

"They are quite beautiful kids and so well behaved. He was an extraordinarily nice man and helpful. He was a very tactile loving father. He loved to gather the girls up and cuddle them," Jack Saltman, a neighbor, told the Guardian. "They would go running at him and he'd catch them in his arms and kiss them. He adored them. His wife was a delightful person and I can't think why anybody would want to harm them."

NBC News reported that al-Hilli worked as an engineer in aeronautics.

The eldest woman has a Swedish passport and has been identified in the British press as grandmother to the two girls.

See full coverage of this story at ITV News

The fourth victim was French cyclist Sylvain Mollier, 40, a father who apparently stumbled across the grisly murder in progress, police said. He was shot five times, at least one time in the forehead, le Dauphine Libere reported. He was on paternity leave from a job at a factory linked to nuclear manufacturer Areva after his third child was born in June.

Mollier had no ties to the British family; he was identified only after his wife reported him missing.

"A woman was worried because her husband went to cycle in this area and didn't come back home," Maillaud said. "He was just cycling in that area and got killed along with this British family."

'She was completely hidden'
French authorities struggled to explain why the 4-year-old wasn't discovered earlier and was left for hours alone in the back seat of the car.

Said Maillaud, according to France's Liberation newspaper: "Initially, a doctor determined that the people in the car were dead. He went to the bodies, determined they were deceased, and he removed himself. There were clothes, bags, and this little girl who remained rigorously still. Even with a thermal heat detector, this little girl was not detected. The doctors who approached the car could not detect this girl because she was completely hidden."

 4 slain in French Alps; girl, possible witness, survives

The car was under guard until midnight, when special investigators arrived from the Paris area and found the girl.

Maillaud said as soon as investigators opened the door, the girl emerged, smiled and reached out her arms; she spoke English but couldn't describe what had happened and was taken into police care.

The 7-year-old girl remains hospitalized. She was placed in an artificial coma but her life is not in danger, Maillaud said Thursday. Both girls are under armed guard.

The Associated Press and NBC's Isolde Raftery contributed to this report. ITV News is the U.K. partner of NBC News. 

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LONDON -- A young woman has told a court in England that as a child she witnessed her 17-year-old sister being murdered by their parents after a months-long quarrel about the teen's Westernized lifestyle.

Alesha Ahmed, 22, who is in a witness protection program, told a court in Chester, England, that she watched as her parents suffocated Shafilea Ahmed at their family home in Warrington in 2003, ITV News reported.

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Prosecutor Andrew Edis told the court Tuesday that Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, and Farzana Ahmed, 49, put their hands over their daughter's face "to close her airways so she could not breathe" and that "she had a bag forced into her mouth."

Read more on this story from ITV News

'Dishonored the family'
Edis said that they murdered their daughter -- after “having spent the best part of 12 months trying to really crush her” – because she had “dishonored the family, bringing shame on them.” The family is of Pakistani origin.

Alesha Ahmed told the court Tuesday that her parents would often argue with their older daughter over the clothes she wore, her friends and who she was speaking to on the phone.

“Shafilea was leading a life she thought our parents would not approve of ... There would be physical abuse directed at Shafilea. It was both of them. My mum more because she was at home more,” she said, according to ITV News.

“There was an incident in the kitchen, she had her hair in a plait and my parents had a knife to scare her. They passed the knife between them. I was in the kitchen then ran off,” she added. “They were just hitting her. It was frantic and out of control and she just sat there taking it. The knife was used to scare her. After I saw she had marks on her neck.”

Alesha Ahmed did not tell police that she had witnessed her sister’s death until 2010 after she was arrested over a robbery at her parents’ house, ITV News reported. She is still to be sentenced over that offense, but Edis said she had not been given “any promises or indeed any inducement prior to when she first made these allegations.”

Read more stories from Britain's ITV News

Edis said her claim was either the truth or “a wicked lie made up to help herself.”

The court heard that police had secretly put a listening device into the Ahmeds’ home in November 2003 when Shafilea Ahmed was still considered as a missing person.

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Farzana Ahmed was heard telling one of her other children, “if the slightest thing comes out of your mouth, we will be stuck in real trouble. Remember that,” ITV News reported.

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The Guardian newspaper said that Iftikhar Ahmed was heard saying, “By getting the support of newspapers, you can get away with murder.”

Honor killings: Moms accused of slaying 2 brides

Edis said the father was also heard saying “What are they going to find in the car?”, while his wife said “Even if they find saliva in the car, it’s not as if she didn’t sit in the car.”

The dead girl’s body was found beside the River Kent in Cumbria, England, in February 2004.

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MEXICO CITY -- Police found the decapitated and dismembered bodies of 18 people near Mexico's second-largest city, Guadalajara, on Wednesday, in what appeared to be the latest atrocity by the country's most brutal drug cartel. 

Thought to have been carried out by the Zetas gang, it was one of the biggest mass beheadings in the recent history of Mexico, where decapitations have become alarmingly common.

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The bodies and heads were stuffed into two vehicles abandoned on the side of a highway in the small town of Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos, said Tomas Coronado, chief prosecutor for the state of Jalisco. 

Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos is located 18 miles south of the center of Guadalajara on the road to Lake Chapala, a site popular with foreign tourists and U.S. retirees.

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Some of the bodies had been refrigerated before they were dumped, Coronado said.

A policeman at the scene in Ixtlahuacan said some victims had been so badly mutilated that officers could not determine whether they were male or female.

The officer said a note by the bodies was signed by the Zetas cartel, a criminal militia led by former Mexican soldiers and blamed for some of the worst atrocities in Mexico's drug war.

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"They are clearly messages between rival groups that are in conflict," Coronado told The Associated Press.

The AP reported that the vehicles, described as minivans, were towed to government offices to unload the bodies.

Guadalajara, known for its high-tech industry, mariachi bands and tequila, has been a strategic base for drug traffickers since the 1980s. 

Violence has flared in the once-tranquil city as the Zetas moved in to challenge the smuggling turf of other gangs in western Mexico.

One killed every half hour in Mexico drug-related violence

Soldiers arrested a high-ranking member of the powerful Sinaloa cartel in the city in March, causing his supporters to block streets with 25 burning cars and trucks.

Attacks between the Zetas and their rivals have flared up across Mexico since the beginning of the year. 

On Friday, nine corpses were hanged from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo just hours before 14 bodies were dismembered and shoved into garbage bags and ice boxes. 

Five days of intense battles in western Sinaloa state last week also left 34 dead, adding to the body count in Mexico's drug war, which has killed more than 50,000 people in the past five years.

Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Senior Pentagon and military officials said Wednesday that they have "no evidence" to support claims by Afghan villagers that they were lined up and threatened at gunpoint by American soldiers prior to the massacre of civilians 10 days ago.

Residents of a village, near where American soldier Sgt Robert Bales is alleged to have killed 16 civilians, are convinced that the slayings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack on U.S. forces in the same area a few days earlier.

In accounts to The Associated Press and to Afghan government officials reported earlier this week, the residents allege that U.S. troops lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack.

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Pentagon officials on Wednesday said they could not completely deny the claims amid the confusion of battlefield reporting, but several officials raise serious doubts about the accusations.

One senior official told NBC News: "We are obviously trying to get to the bottom of these claims and if there's any credence to them it will come out in the ongoing investigation."

Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby told reporters Wednesday afternoon he "can't rule it out" but there was "no evidence" of any attack on US forces in that region prior to the massacre as claimed.

Villagers: Afghan slayings were an act of retaliation

The lawyer for Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is accused in the March 11 killings of the 16 civilians, has said that his client was upset because a buddy had lost a leg in an explosion on March 9.

It's unclear if the bombing cited by attorney John Henry Browne was the same as the one described by the villagers that prompted the alleged threats. After a meeting at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Browne said Bales told him a roadside bomb blew off the leg of one of his friends two days before the shootings occurred.

Inquiry targets 'command climate' in Afghan killings

Bales, 38, is suspected of leaving a U.S. base in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, entering homes and gunning down nine children, four men and three women before dawn on March 11 in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai. Mokhoyan is about 500 yards east of the base.

The shootings have further strained ties between the U.S. government and President Hamid Karzai, who has accused the U.S. military of not cooperating with a delegation he appointed to investigate the killings.

NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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