Police believe that a British tourist found lying dead in a pool of blood with a wound to the head, just yards from the hotel in eastern France where he was staying with his partner and a friend, was murdered, reports The Telegraph.
The 50-year-old, who has not been named, was believed to have stopped for the night on the way home from Italy in a budget Formule 1 hotel in the Epenottes industrial estate in Dole, a town in the Jura region of France that borders Switzerland.
He left his room late on Saturday to go for a walk late and did not return, hotel workers said. A woman - believed to be his wife - only noticed his absence the next morning at around 8am and immediately went looking for him with the help of hotel staff.
They found his body a short time later lying in a car park in front of an adjacent discount clothing store and alerted the police.
The manager of the store told The Telegraph that police had examined the CCTV tapes from a camera focused on the car park but the tapes showed no one arriving or leaving on Saturday night.
"We are treating the death as suspicious,” prosecutor Elsa Beurton said, adding that no possible murder weapon had been found and that it was not yet clear what had caused the wound to the man’s head nor whether it was the cause of death.
A post mortem had been due to be carried out on Monday but was postponed until Tuesday, and would be carried out at the nearby city of Besançon, she said.
Hotel workers said the three Britons had on Saturday evening had drinks with other hotel guests on the tables arranged in front of the hotel where rooms cost 30 euros a night.
Read more of this report from The Telegraph.