Zainab al-Hilli, French Alps shooting survivor, leaves hospital

GlobalPost

Zainab al-Hilli – the 7-year-old girl who survived the French Alps shooting – left a French hospital today, presumably home to England.

Zainab awoke from a medically induced coma on the weekend after someone shot and beat her, killing her parents and grandmother during a family camping trip, AFP reported.

She survived along with her 4-year-old sister Zeena – who hid under her mother’s lifeless body for eight hours.

Zeena, who was uninjured, returned to England last week.

British police left the hospital with Zainab, but there was no official word on their destination.

More from GlobalPost: French Alps shooting survivor awakens from coma

The gunman also shot and killed a Frenchman – 45-year-old Sylvain Mollier – who stumbled upon the grisly Sept. 6 scene while riding his bike.

The girls’ father, Saad al-Hilli, was an engineer with Middle Eastern origins.

Police say they don’t know if the execution-style murder relates to his professional or personal lives, France 24 reported.

There was speculation Saad and his brother had argued over an inheritance, a claim the brother denies.

On Thursday, the first witness to the shooting described finding a horrific scene.

Brett Martin, a 53-year-old former Air Force pilot from England, said he thought he’d encountered a car crash.

“I’ve never seen people who have been shot before … it seemed to me just like a Hollywood scene and if someone had said ‘cut’ and everyone had walked away, that would have been it,” he said, The Guardian reported. “But unfortunately it was real life.”

More from GlobalPost: Bomb squad at UK home of family killed in French Alps

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