I don’t know if there will be justice: Fiona Mackeown

PANAJI - Fiona Mackeown, mother of British teenager Scarlett Keeling who was raped and murdered in Goa, has said that she does not know if her dead daughter will get justice.

Mackeown, 45, in an interview to a British newspaper said: “To be honest, I don’t know if there will be justice. I’d love to be there hearing every single detail (during the trial), because there does seem to be stuff that we don’t know.”

Mackeown told the The Observer, a Sunday newspaper, that details emerging during her daughter’s trial only confirmed that the Goa police were intent on covering up the homicide from the very beginning, possibly to protect the drug trade in the tourist state.

She was scheduled to be in Goa to attend the trial at the Goa Children’s Court where two beach shack hands Samson DSouza and Placido Carvalho are being tried for sexually assaulting her daughter and leaving her to die at Anjuna beach in February 2008.

But with the volcanic ash disrupting flight schedules across Europe, Mackeown had to drop her plans of visiting India.

“The police were paid off, without a doubt. They tried to make a murder look like an accident,” she told the newspaper, adding that the authorities in India were not interested in unearthing the truth.

“I don’t think the Indian government really wants the truth to come out. I think it would be embarrassing for them. They are either protecting the police officers or protecting the drug trade or the image of Goa,” she said.

Mackeown said that she was not surprised when in course of the trial police officials admitted to seeing marks on her daughter’s half naked dead body found near the tide-line at Anjuna beach.

“I know now that they knew they were there to start with, that it was all a big lie,” she told the newspaper, referring to the initial repeated denials by the Goa police that the 15-year-old’s body had scars on it.

Mackeown’s campaign for justice grabbed international attention and exposed Goa’s seedy narcotics-infested underbelly. Mackeown has been alleging that Goa’s powerful drug mafia, sheltered by politicians and policemen, was covering up her daughter’s death.