THURSDAY, MAY 02, 2024
Sujay Gupta
For Vikram Varma a genial soft-spoken steely lawyer, whose quiet persistence saw the virtually closed “drowning case” of British teenager Scarlett Keeling in 2008, to be reopened by the CBI as a full-fledged murder investigation, the news of a semi-nude body of a young girl, not much older than Scarlett on Calangute beach, two days ago, brought about a sense of melancholic De-Ja Vu. “Not again”, felt Varma, the go-to lawyer and friend of many foreigners especially Russians, who need any kind of legal or consular assistance.
Varma gained his reputation and trust when he, as the first genuine legal responder to Scarlett’s mother, had what he calls a “smell of suspicion”, when the police literally sprung to action to dismiss it as a case of drowning. It was assumed that it was accidental and homicidal. Varma pieced other little details and deep-dived to find a trail that confirmed his suspicion that Scarlett's death was almost certainly homicidal and he pursued with that line, a line that the even the CBI perhaps only reluctantly pursued.
In September 2016, the trial court had acquitted both accused Samson D’Souza and Placido Carvalho (aka Shana Boy) giving them the benefit of doubt citing lack of conclusive evidence and lapses on the part of the prosecution. However, Scarlet’s mother and her legal team did not give up and prevailed upon the State to appeal in the High Court. On July 2019 D’Souza was convicted for culpable homicide (not amounting to murder) destruction of evidence, outraging modesty and child abuse. Placido Carvalho was acquitted
On hearing the initial statement of the North Goa police, after the Aldona girls, the semi-nude body was found, Varma, finding an uncanny replaying of events said “I had the same uncanny sense of foreboding. Normally autopsy reports give the cause of death. In this case, it is drowning. It is now up to the police to investigate and determine if the death is accidental or homicidal. I am getting a smell of suspicion. In these cases, it's best to lodge an FIR keeping the homicidal theory so that you do not lose time to investigate. If it's dismissed as an accidental drowning, then the police do not investigate and look for clues. That is what happened in the Scarlett Keeling case.”
Varma pointed out that one of the two main accused Samson D Souza got convicted of destroying evidence and he had the time to destroy evidence because of the inordinately long time that the police took to gather evidence and secure it, in the immediate 72 hours after Scarlett’s body was found on the beach at Anjuna in February 2008. Varma who has seen it all, and the similarity is uncanny, wonders how plausible is the police theory that this girl’s clothes were separated from her body due to the waves and the force of the water. “In a suicide by drowning attempt, the victim does not normally remove all her clothes and then goes into the water,” he said.
What is seen here is the hurry to propagate a theory. Adv Caroline Colaco, a noted criminal lawyer agrees that coming to rushed conclusions either by habit or design has plagued the Goa police for long. She recalled a case in Anjuna a decade ago where a young woman died seemingly due to natural causes in her flat. As she was being taken away, an alert neighbour felt that something was not right. After insisting that body be examined further, a bullet was discovered embed in the victim. If this hadn’t happened, this would have been added to the long list of deaths passed off as natural or accidental. No conviction has been secured in this case either.
The only line of separation between the Scarlett case and that of this very young Aldona girl, is that she was a Goan and not a tourist. But then this is another blot in a very soiled canvas of gruesome crimes against young men and women, most of them tourists, where an absolutely incompetent and shoddy police investigations have delayed and denied justice. Doubts remain in the Scarlett Keeling case whether the full cast of characters who knew exactly what happened came under the radar of police investigations and even if they did; lack of material evidence made them get away.
And this is the frustration that Fiona MacKeown mother of Scarlett Keeling, and friends who helped Fionna through these traumatic years feel. And yet this is just a fragment of many such pieces with jagged edges, of the hurt and anger of very saddened relatives, friends and loved ones of those who came to Goa to consume a slice of paradise and sunk themselves in to a cosmos of nightmares and finally death.
The truth they bore before their lives were snapped, very often by those they began to trust in Goa, went with them.
Their loved ones have formed a solidarity group of sorts for bonding, empathy and above all the energy they need to sustain the long, never-ending legal battle in India and the parallel one with the authorities who have clearly moved on, and see the constant follow-ups from abroad as irritants in their cosy work lives. For them, these are just stories or headlines from newspapers that are very old. For the loved ones of those who have died in Goa, many of them murdered, their quest for justice will never be dead, as long as they are alive.
Herald has pursued their stories for more than a decade. It is from this paper's archives that this writer recalled that “in March 2017, Maureen Sweeney sister of Denyse Sweeney, Amanda Bennett sister of Stephen Bennett, Sanna Pirhonen-Cutter aunt of Felix Dahl and Minna Pirhonen mother of Felix Dahl met in the UK” They are all family members who lost close ones in Goa and had till then not received justice.
The report also stated that “A year later Sanna Cutter, who’s dedicated to fighting for justice for her nephew, Felix Dahl” made a long-distance call to them from Finland to discuss her fight for justice for her beloved Felix. Felix was found dead in Goa in 2015 off the road to Agonda under mysterious circumstances.”
“Cutter along with Minna Pirhonen, the mother of Felix and her dear sister spend hours on the Internet, reading of crimes in India, investigations, following up on crimes against foreign nationals and all kinds of court proceedings and rulings across India related to crime and murder.”
Our paper has also reported that “Cutter then got a few relatives of foreign victims in Goa including Parvati Dasi, mother of Caitanya Holt, Minna Pirhonen, mother of Felix Dahl, Jim Durkin, father of James Durkin, Lori Arndt, mother of Kyle Arndt, Fiona Mackeown, mother of Scarlett Keeling, Maureen Sweeney, Amanda Bennett, sister of Stephen Bennett, Sara Neighbor, sister of Martin Neighbor, Pauline Harvey, mother of Michael Harvey, and Davis Burbank, father of Jonathan Burbank to write a joint petition asking for a commission to be appointed to inquire into these cases of murder.”
In a Messenger conversation with Herald on Friday morning Sanna Cutter said “I would also like to remind you of the case of James Durkin. He went missing few weeks after Felix (same area) and his torso was found on Agonda beach a few weeks later. His body was missing his head and legs and he too was filed as a drowning death. Someone contacted me who had seen his body that his body was had clean cuts and not eaten by sharks as indicated by the police. I even spoke with a shark specialist and he confirmed that. What comes to Felix's case and the explanation given by police for him falling on his own and hitting his head 5 times and getting a broken skull is not believable. It's physically impossible to achieve.”
She had a piece of advice for the family of the Goan girl who went missing on Wednesday after she was last seen near Mapusa and her semi nude body was found on Calangute beach the next day. “My advice for the family of this girl is to have a second independent autopsy done, otherwise, they will never know the truth.”
Dr Minna Pirhonnen, mother of Dahl, whose body was found in Patnem, Canacona had told Herald earlier that there is “systematic injustice and human rights violation taking place in Goa.” And it's easy to understand where she came from. The Canacona police had claimed that Dahl had died after he obtained five wounds on the back of his head and a broken skull while doing acrobatics alone on a silent sandy road in the middle of the night. Herald has reported that this explanation was accepted by the court. “However, after his mother’s petition in the High Court, wherein Canacona police was accused of biased and faulty investigation as they refused to make an FIR and deliberately overlooked the possibility of assault and murder, the High Court transferred the investigation to CBI.”
She had further alleged that when tourists die in Goa, the autopsy is neither photographed nor videographed to make it difficult to prove an assault or murder later when the death is investigated by CBI. “However, the Goan authorities forget that due to the same reasons, it is also impossible to exclude an assault or murder,” she says.
She expressed her anger further by saying “Many people, including Goan policemen, participated in the killing of Caitanya Holt but no investigation followed. James Durkin was found dead with head and limbs removed but an FIR was not registered, and his death was not investigated as a murder by Goan authorities. And so on...there are hundreds of similar cases.”
The law-and-order system surely needs redemption. But above all the system needs to identify, isolate and punish the men (and women) in uniform and in different agencies that have quite deliberately and unequivocally used the system to weigh heavily on victims seeking justice and not the perpetrators, many of them sons of our soil.
All that is different in the latest case is that the devasted parents of this young woman live here and will feel the weight of this injustice so close to home, if they have the will to unearth why their daughter will not be with them for her next birthday and never ever after.
Sujay Gupta is the Consulting Editor Herald Publications and tweets @sujaygupta0832
