Category Archives: News Reads

Scarred ground still gives up its secrets

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A NATION REMEMBERS

The sacrifice made by Diggers in World War I is duly honoured by the French village of Bullecourt, writes Karen Kissane.
The blanket of green fields around Bullecourt is peaceful on a misty morning, shaped by man and his machines into gentle slopes known for their production of those unromantic crops, potato and sugar beet.
Well tilled though they are, the fields still yield some surprises – or perhaps, given the history of Bullecourt, surprise is not quite the right word. The farmers here still occasionally turn a clod to find something beneath – a button, a knife, a bullet – left by a soldier long ago.
“Each year the plough blades bring to the surface unexploded shells, scrap metal, the bones of lost soldiers,” says Bullecourt’s mayor, Jules Laude.
In 1917, this small village in northern France sat on the formidable Hindenberg Line established by the German military in World War I. On April 11 that year, the British High Command ordered Australian troops to march across open, snow-covered ground without support from tanks or artillery to try to break the German defences.
The Australians took the forward German lines but the Germans attacked from the sides, forcing them into a bloody retreat. There were 3300 casualties among the 5000 Australians.
A second assault on May 3 resulted in the Australians taking the Bullecourt trenches. The two sides fought to a standstill and the Germans abandoned the area on May 20. This time there were 7000 Australian casualties, though they were supported on the left flank by the British 62nd Division.
One young soldier, Private John Ambrose Ware of the 3rd Battalion AIF, wrote without punctuation to his mother in Victoria about what such a battlefield looked like.
“If ever you saw a sheep camp in time of drought you will know how many sheep [died] in one night our men are lying about in just the same way only a drop of blood spilt to show where they are hit,” he wrote.
But the hard-won victory at Bullecourt was soon overtaken, with the village changing hands not long after.
More than 290,000 men served on the Western Front with the Australian Imperial Force, and 46,000 were killed. Eventually Bullecourt itself became a casualty, razed by bombardment over many battles. “Nineteen times this place was taken and retaken,” Laude says. “It was completely demolished.”
In the new war museum at Bullecourt, there is a grainy photograph of the pitted moonscape that greeted any of its inhabitants who returned after the war; every building was smashed to smithereens. “A town annihilated,” reads the caption.
The town was rebuilt from scratch in the 1920s. In the decades since, mementoes of the battles fought here have been unearthed and many are now in a refurbished museum that will be opened today in a ceremony attended by the Veterans’ Affairs Minister, Warren Snowdon.
The Australian government donated a large portion of the €980,000 ($1.23 million) it took to renovate and extend an old stable that had been donated by a former mayor, Jean Letaille, to hold his collection, which he had been gathering since the 1980s. He died last month, just before his dream came to fruition.
The museum is part of a wider project to establish an Australian Remembrance Trail along the Western Front before the centenary of the outbreak of World War I in 2014.
From the museum’s ceiling hangs a rusty art installation of battered shovels – the Diggers were given their name for a reason – as well as horseshoes, water canteens and helmets. Underneath lie the turret and gun of a tank.
On walls nearby are medical exhibits: a surgeon’s brass saw, a slatted wooden stretcher. There are small glass bottles that might have carried morphine and opium for pain relief, or the camphor and caffeine used to revive flagging hearts, or the iodine that routinely stained brown the lips of harried nurses who removed the corks of the bottles with their teeth.
In the backyard of the museum stands a deactivated shell, pointing at the sky. Authorities have yet to decide where it could be displayed to best advantage, Laude says.
While the British soldiers who fought at Bullecourt are also remembered – one display has an eloquent letter of sympathy written by a chaplain to the widow of an officer of the 62nd who died there, Captain H.B. Gallimore – it is Australia’s fighters who are best memorialised.
The town has a “slouch hat” monument outside the church, and along the Rue des Australiens is a memorial park with a bronze statue of the “Bullecourt Digger”. His kit caked in mud, he gazes out over the fields where the AIF lost 10,000 soldiers killed or wounded.
The statue was created by the Melbourne sculptor Peter Corlett, who discovered only after he was commissioned that his father, Kenneth, had fought at Bullecourt. He gave the statue his father’s features, trying to capture “the fresh face of a young man about to set out on a great adventure”.
In the lobby of the local council building is a photograph of Major Henry William “Mad Harry” Murray, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for the second time for his valour at Bullecourt on April 11, 1917. Despite many acts of derring-do, he survived the war.
Not so lucky was Major Percy Black of Beremboke, Victoria, who earned the Distinguished Conduct Medal at Gallipoli. In the second battle of Bullecourt, he saw his men pulled up at the wire of the Hindenberg Line; the tanks that were meant to have breached it for them had not appeared. He ran to the front yelling, “Come on boys, bugger the tanks!” He was killed shortly afterwards and his body never found.
There were terrible losses on both sides. There are said to be 45,000 German dead buried in this area, too.
For Letaille, who, with his wife Denise was made an honorary member of the Order of Australia for work on the museum, the emotional legacy of that era remained vivid.
Laude chuckles over the time Letaille found himself unexpectedly having to host a group of Germans who wanted to see the museum. Uneasy, he rang Laude to join him.
Laude’s eyes light up with mischief as he recalls how Letaille greeted the Germans: “It’s been a while since we last saw you.”

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Breivik planned to behead former PM

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OSLO

HIS voice is quiet, so quiet he had to be asked to adjust the microphone. His tone is conversational, his eye contact with the prosecutor steady and calm, his suit and tie properly sober. But somehow, Anders Behring Breivik’s cool and collected demeanour serves only to intensify the collective nausea in the courtroom.
In the same expressionless tone as when he remarked on how well he slept the night before the massacres in which he killed 77 people last July, he told how he had planned to take a digital camera to the Labour youth camp on Utoya island — as well as a knife and a bayonet — because he knew former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland was scheduled to be there.
“I had originally planned to bring an iPhone to film and to upload film to the internet of the execution of Gro Harlem Brundtland,” he said.
“I had a bayonet on my rifle and I also had a knife in addition and the plan was to chop her head off . . . while filming it and then upload the film [to the internet].”
Filming of beheadings, he added, was “a potent psychological weapon”. Although he had taken the idea from al-Qaeda, “it’s important to point out that decapitation is traditional European death penalty method and was practised in France till 1960 and was also practised previously in Norway”.
But the battery on the camera went flat and he decided that, anyway, he would not have time to upload the video before police arrived, so he abandoned the idea.
Breivik was forced to abandon a second plan, too. He had not intended to use his rifle and pistol — with which he killed 69 people, most of them teenagers — except to frighten them.
“The objective was not to shoot all of them but to use shooting weapons as a detonator [forcing people into the water around the island] and use the water as the weapon of mass destruction . . . I considered it extremely difficult to swim away from that [island].”
But the 500 or so people on the island did not flee into the water in great numbers. Breivik instead used 183 bullets to kill 69 of them. He shot one teenage girl six times.
The objective was not to kill 69, he said. “The objective was to kill them all.”
He chose soft-point bullets because they have greater stopping and killing power and he chose a pistol and a rifle for which he could buy large ammunition magazines.
He chose Utoya and its teenagers because another political target, such as Labour Party headquarters, would have resulted in the deaths of “innocent civilians”.
The teenagers on Utoya were political activists who supported multiculturalism and 44 of them held leadership positions in the youth wing, meaning they were neither innocent nor civilians, to his mind. But Breivik said shooting people was much harder than bombing them. “To do something like what happened on Utoya is contrary to human nature and to make yourself do something like that you have to work on yourself for a very long time,” he told the court. “If you are able to train yourself into hammering away your emotions and to despise death — but even then it is difficult . . . It’s easy to press a button [and detonate a bomb] but it’s very, very difficult to carry out something as barbaric as a firearms-based operation.” He had trained himself to deaden his emotions with daily meditation and visualisation.
Of the bomb he had earlier exploded outside government buildings in the heart of Oslo, Breivik said: “The aim was to kill the entire government of Norway including the Prime Minister. That was the primary objective of the attack on government offices . . . in the best-case scenario.”
He considered that attack to have failed because it did not kill what he saw as his minimum prize: 12 people (eight died in the blast).
Hour after hour, Breivik continued to answer the questions of the prosecutor who was trying to find out what he had been thinking as he prepared for his assaults.
Bereaved relatives looked distraught at his evidence.
Lawyers, those supposedly hardened professionals, wore expressions of disgust, horror or pain. Breivik’s right hand played with a ballpoint pen. Occasionally, he helped himself from a carafe of water: thirsty business, this. A couple of times he pronounced himself tired and asked for a break.
Prosecutor Svein Holden asked Breivik how he felt now about the attack on Utoya. Breivik said firmly: “I stand by Utoya and I stand by what I have done and I would still do it again.” For a moment, the courtroom fell utterly still.

First published in The Age.

Anger and resignation as Breivik spouts his views

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OSLO: He gives a Nazi-style salute when he arrives in the courtroom each morning. He tells the court he rejects its authority because its mandate comes from political parties that support multiculturalism. And he admits that because he hates Muslims he killed 77 people and wishes it were more.
But Anders Behring Breivik is treated with grave civility in Oslo’s District Court and has five days of testimony in which to expound his twisted political views. To those used to the rigid laws of evidence in the British-style system of justice, the openness of this trial is extraordinary and, some have suggested, dangerous.
Why give the narcissistic Breivik a soapbox when that is just what he wants? Could he inspire other sick loners into copycat crimes? Is it right to allow him to wound victims’ families yet again by allowing him to denigrate the loved ones he killed?
In his first day of evidence, Breivik said the many teenagers he slaughtered at a Labour Party youth camp last July were not childlike innocents but more akin to Hitler Youth. He also attacked by name journalist Marte Michelet, who writes on Islamophobia and whose Iranian-born partner, Ali Esbati, survived the massacre on Utoya Island.
Breivik said Michelet, who had lectured at the camp, was an extreme Marxist and a traitor for having had a baby by Esbati, and her attendance showed how corrupt Labour’s youth wing was.
But Mr Esbati still strongly defends the openness of Breivik’s trial, and is one of many Norwegians who feel the court should have allowed Breivik’s evidence to be televised (the court has banned TV cameras from some parts of the proceedings: Breivik’s own testimony, the evidence of victims, and the screening of footage of his bomb blast).
Mr Esbati has said it was important to hear Breivik’s reasoning because his views could be found elsewhere in Europe: “These views are extreme but unfortunately, to a growing degree, they have been normalised and moved into the mainstream of European political debate; the idea that Muslims are problematic per se, the proposition that there are warlike situations in European countries and that we should take political action against that.”
Even those uncomfortable with the trial process acknowledge it has its merits. One of the rescuers at Utoya, Allan Jensen, told Sky News: “I don’t like him getting speaker’s corner for a whole week. I don’t think that’s good. But that’s democracy.”
More generally, many Norwegians are recoiling from the blizzard of Breivik media reports. Before his trial began, a survey found that one-third of Norwegians thought there had been too much coverage of his crimes. The newspaper Dagbladet has offered a no-Breivik button on its website. Before he committed his atrocities, Breivik wrote that the purpose of a trial for someone like him was to win more sympathisers.
The reporter Asne Seierstad wrote that the trial would give him what he wanted, “a stage, a pulpit, a spellbound, notebook-clutching, pencil-wielding audience … are we puppets on a string, or are we doing what’s right and necessary?”
Jon Johnsen, professor of law at the University of Oslo, told the Herald the openness was in accordance with Norwegian law and would help to debunk myths that might otherwise be created about Breivik’s motivation for what he had done. “Of course his views are offending but the question is whether they become more dangerous if he’s allowed to express them than if he’s not.”
Svein Bruras, associate professor of journalism at Volda University College, had been critical of some of the media coverage. But he too supports the openness of the trial, critical only of the decision to ban broadcasting of Breivik’s evidence.
“This is the most serious act of crime in Norway since World War II,” he said. “It affects the entire nation and a lot of people are following the court proceedings through the media and when they are denied the possibility of listening to Breivik, they are not given a full account of proceedings.” He said it was important for people to see his demeanour for themselves, given that a central question is whether Breivik is sane.
“I know he had other supporters out there, maybe not very many, and there’s a danger he may inspire other people, but I think we need to hear his explanations.”
Professor Bruras said the media had been responsible in their reporting and had not published gruesome details of the killings. In one example of such a judgment call, the Guardian journalist Helen Pidd refused to tweet some of Breivik’s comments at one point, saying they were “too heartless”.
Thomas Mathiesen, professor of sociology of law at Oslo University, said Breivik had not been able to distort the openness of Norway’s system because what he says is filtered through lawyers, journalists and the Norwegian people themselves, whose view of him is “markedly critical, and that means he doesn’t get across his message”.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Man of stone Breivik reduces himself to tears

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OSLO: The man in the white shirt was doomed. You knew it as soon as you saw the time he appeared on the grainy closed-circuit TV footage, walking towards the parked van in which Anders Behring Breivik had stashed a 950kg bomb.

The people watching the video in Oslo’s central courthouse knew that the blast went off at 3.25 pm. The man appeared in the video just three minutes before that.

The film showed that Breivik himself had already taken off on foot, walking steadily towards his next dance with death on Utoya Island, knowing that he had seven minutes to get out of range before his bomb’s fuse burned to its lethal end. The man in the white shirt, blurry, nameless and faceless to his hushed audience, had no such awareness.

In action movies, people are shown blown off their feet before being consumed by a blast. That did not happen here. An orange ball of flame spouted like dragon’s breath across the screen where the man had been. He was not seen again.

The blast that killed eight people was seen again, over and over, from cameras in different vantage points: the building whose windows blew out and shattered to the ground, shards of glass beating fluttering sheets of paper to the ground; the building surrounded by clouds of smoke, emerging grey and ghostly and covered with ash; the convenience store where customers ducked groceries that were flying off the shelves as if poltergeists were throwing tantrums and tins.

In court, Breivik sat impassively, apparently unmoved by his handiwork.

He seemed equally untouched by other dramatic evidence in this first day of his trial for the terrorist attacks in which his bomb and his shootings killed 77 people, mostly teenagers, last July.

Prosecutors played a desperate phone call that Renate Taarnes, 22, made from a toilet cubicle in a building on Utoya Island as Breivik systemically hunted down and killed the staff and teenagers at a summer camp for the Labour Party’s youth wing.

Taarnes, who had locked herself in the cubicle, told the operator: “There’s shooting all the time and there’s complete panic here!… There’s someone shooting, walking around shooting!”

Her voice dropped to a whisper: “He’s coming! He’s coming!”. She sobbed, and then grabbed at self-control and fell silent but for her panicked breathing.

Then the shots came. Crack crack crack crack crack. At least 23 shots were fired as she hung on to the phone and to her hope of rescue. Taarnes survived, but around her, seven people died and six were injured. In the next building he entered, Breivik killed another five. Then another 10, on the ill-named Lover’s Path.

At some point during this tale, Breivik, who has said he regrets not having killed more people, licked his lips, as if unsettled. But it was his lawyers who showed the emotion he should have been feeling; lead defence counsel Geir Lippestad looked grim and troubled, rubbing his hand over his face, and the face of second counsel Vibeke Hein Baera was crumpled with distress.

Breivik had remained blank-faced earlier in the day too, as a prosecutor took one hour and 10 minutes to read the indictment, a ghastly litany of relentless slaughter, of torn flesh and maimed lives. Every victim was named and their injuries described: Breivik’s bullets went through eyes and took sight, they destroyed arms and legs that had to be amputated, they ripped through brains and mouths and breasts and scrotums.

But the man of stone did weep at one point. The prosecutors showed a video Breivik had put together vilifying Muslims and glorifying his alleged crusade against them. To stirring music, it called for “infidels” to revolt against the domination of Islam in Europe. It showed a picture of a bloodied blonde woman with text that asked: “Has your daughter, sister or girlfriend experienced cultural enrichment by the Muslim community yet?”

As the video played, Breivik was apparently moved to tears and had to put a hand over his eyes.

He showed himself to be a man capable of being moved, but only by his own propaganda.

After all, every man has his breaking point.

First published on smh.com.au

Justice at last for Jeanette, as killer jailed

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A French detective never doubted she would catch Jeanette O’Keefe’s killer, writes Karen Kissane.

VERSAILLES

FRENCH policewoman Captain Cathy Nicol first met Jeanette O’Keefe, the young Melbourne woman who would consume much of the next decade of her life, on January 2, 2001.
Nicol had been having lunch with colleagues from the criminal brigade, which is based in the graceful Louis XIV town of Versailles, when the call came. Two young boys had found a body in a sleeping bag in a car park on the dingy western outskirts of Paris.
Nicol was 25 and had been in the homicide brigade only six months. This was not her first murder case, but it would become her passion. The victim, so badly beaten she was unrecognisable, was a young woman, like herself.
Jeanette, 28, was the woman in the sleeping bag.
Nicol was determined to find this killer: Jeanette was “une innocente”, a nice Australian girl who had been caught like a fly in a web in one of the grim, hostile ghettos that scar the outer rings of the French capital.
“There are different categories of crime,” Nicol tells The Sunday Age through an interpreter. “There are gangs who do revenge killings; there are drug killings; there is alcohol and violence. But Jeanette was a completely innocent victim. She was the true victim, the poor girl who this never should have happened to.”
Her whole squad, she says, was touched by the case they came to call “L’affaire O’Keefe”.
Their years of perseverance paid off. On Friday, 11 years and six days after Jeanette was beaten and strangled to death on New Year’s Eve 2000, 37-year-old Adriano Araujo da Silva was jailed for 30 years, with a 20-year minimum, for her murder. He had pleaded not guilty and has vowed to appeal.
But for now, there is relief not just for Jeanette’s family — her parents, Kevin and Susan O’Keefe of Ferntree Gully, and her three siblings — but for the detective who was determined to track down her killer.
Nicol and Jeanette lived half a world away from each other, but they had in common things other than their youth. Nicol is small and slight, with piercing green eyes that blaze when she talks about the case, her words rapping out like machine-gun fire.
Jeanette was also small, “five foot nothing”, say her two sisters and brother, and she, too, was a pretty, green-eyed brunette.
They also shared a stubborn streak. Jeanette’s might have inadvertently led her to her death; Nicol’s helped to solve the case, though she scrunches up her face in Gallic distaste at the suggestion she is “stubborn”. “I am tenacious,” she declares.
There is another factor that led to the two women’s paths crossing: chance. A series of small mishaps seem to have led the normally cautious Jeanette into mortal danger on the night she was killed.
Eight years later, it was one small mishap followed by a routine police procedure that saw her killer caught.
Da Silva, a Brazilian-born petty criminal who was raised in Guyana before emigrating to France, told the court Jeanette, whom he met on the night she died, was the love of his life, the woman he saw as the future mother of his children.
Police told a different story. They alleged he had bashed the petite computer programmer around the head 13 times with an iron bar. When she regained consciousness, he strangled her with his hands. When that did not work, he strangled her a second time with an electric cord. Then he threw her body out a window before dragging it clear of his apartment block.
Jeanette was a reserved woman, careful about whom she let into her private circle, “not a person who went to nightclubs”, says her sister Denise. She was musical, writing ballads as a hobby and playing guitar, piano and violin.
She was also savvy, especially about work. Says her brother, Craig: “She went to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers and only earned $25,000 but they put her through a $10,000 course in Oracle [a computer script]. So then she quit and started being a consultant for $75 an hour.”
Jeanette had been travelling alone on a European holiday when she decided to study French in Paris during November and December 2000. She checked out of her hostel on December 31 because she was due to fly to the United States two days later.
The hostel took bookings by the month and staying even one more night would have cost her four weeks’ accommodation. “She didn’t want to spring for a hotel,” Denise says, and intended to stay at the home of a new French friend, Elise, before catching a flight to New York.
The plan was for Jeanette to get to the outer-suburban train station nearest Elise’s house, where Elise would pick her up with a car because she was carrying a large rucksack.
Here came the first mishap. Elise waited at the station for an hour, but Jeanette did not appear. Elise waited several more hours at home but did not hear from Jeanette. She is uncertain, now, whether she might have confused the time she was due to meet her friend. Neither of the women had mobile phones.
Jeanette called another friend, a man named Tony, to ask if she could stay with him. He agreed to meet her on the Champs Elysees but did not turn up as arranged, he later told police. This was Jeanette’s second mishap.
“He was annoyed at her because a few weeks earlier she had pulled out of an outing with him because she was sick,” Denise says. “Tony later told police that [he didn’t want her to stay over] because it meant he would have to sleep on the floor and he had a bad back. So he was deliberately late for the rendezvous.”
He later had a change of heart, but it was too late.
Jeanette, by now tired and stressed, with partygoers filling the centre of Paris, then rang Elise’s home and spoke to her mother. The mother gave her complex directions in French for getting to the train station again.
Police later worked out that Jeanette had made the call from a public phone box only 50 metres from where Tony had finally turned up to meet her.
Here came the third mishap: Elise’s mother did not replace the phone properly in the cradle. If Jeanette had tried to call again, she would not have got through.
A small woman with a large backpack, worried about the cost of a night in a hotel, was stranded in Paris. And here came Jeanette’s fourth and unluckiest mishap: she ran into Adriano da Silva, and for some reason agreed to go back to his apartment with him.
Her family thinks da Silva may have offered to carry her rucksack. Maybe she was lost on the wrong train. Maybe he offered to get her to a phone, speculates Denise. No one knows for sure because da Silva isn’t saying.
Ultimately, however, Denise believes at some point in the evening Jeanette “refused him [sex] and he lost it”.
Da Silva says he met her that night on the Champs Elysees — but he has said many things that he now admits were lies.
This was all unknown to Cathy Nicol when Jeanette’s body was discovered. Her squad’s first task was to identify the victim. It was not until Interpol in Canberra sent police Jeanette’s description that Nicol had a clue.
Nine days after they first knew their beloved Jeanette was missing, the O’Keefe family’s worst fears were realised.
In Paris, police tried to retrace her last hours. They spoke to people at the hostel and set up three lines of inquiry: kidnappers on the books; offenders who had committed crimes on trains; and about 200 single men in the apartments near where Jeanette’s body was found. The men were sent orders telling them to present to police to give a DNA sample. Only 10 men failed to respond. Da Silva, police realised much later, was one of them.
France’s full DNA database was only created in 2005-06, Nicol says, and it was another two years before technology was able to get a useful sample of the flesh found under the fingernails of Jeanette’s right hand. She had scratched her attacker.
It was this evidence that kept hope alive for Nicol. Never did she doubt that the killer would be found: “I knew that one day we would get a match.”
That day turned out to be February 2, 2009. Nicol said she will never forget the call confirming the database had found a match.
“It was incredible,” says Nicol, who had been emailing Jeanette’s mother for years. With tears in her eyes, she recalls: “I was oh, so happy. I have goosebumps just thinking about it.”
Nicol, by then the last remaining member of the original investigation team, shared the interrogation of da Silva, a man who lived on the edge of society.
He had been born to a white Brazilian mother who fostered him out as a toddler before he was retrieved by his black Brazilian father, who took him to French Guyana to grow up with his step-family. He had identity issues, a derogatory view of women, problems facing reality, and lacked the capacity to feel both compassion and guilt, a psychologist would later tell the court in Versailles.
He had been caught after he ran a police roadblock because he was unlicensed and uninsured. He later went to police claiming the vehicle had been stolen from him; they didn’t believe it and charged him, taking DNA as part of that process.
During the interrogation he denied ever having met Jeanette and said he didn’t recognise her photo. Told there was DNA evidence linking him to Jeanette’s murder, he said there must be a mistake, before creating an elaborate story about having saved her from two “black” attackers.
When he was told that not only was his skin found under her nails but one of his hairs had been found inside the sleeping bag she was dumped in, he asked to phone his girlfriend. Sitting in the police office opposite Nicol, he told his girlfriend that he had killed a woman with an iron bar — a detail not released publicly.
“We could see the relief when he confessed,” Nicol says. “When somebody wants to get the truth off their shoulders we see a physical change. He just relaxed.”
The team was too tired to celebrate, she says, as they hadn’t slept for 48 hours: “But it was a good tiredness.”
Celebration would have been premature. In April, after three months in jail, da Silva recanted.
In court last week he pleaded not guilty and Jeanette’s brother and sisters sat through a long and salacious tale in which he alleged consensual sex with Jeanette in a variety of ways. He claimed he threw her out when she refused more sex with him, and gave her the sleeping bag to sleep in.
Earlier in the trial, the judge warned him that his refusal to take responsibility would weigh against him. It did; 30 years is France’s maximum sentence.
Nicol was at work when the verdict was delivered. But she arrived later to congratulate Jeanette’s family and friends. They wanted a private photo to commemorate the moment and gathered under an archway in the court complex with uncertain expressions. What is the etiquette for this kind of snapshot?
At the end of the line stood Nicol, shoulders back, wearing the tiniest of smiles, and unshed tears in those fierce green eyes.HOW IT HAPPENED
December 31, 2000, 9pm Jeanette O’Keefe makes a phone call to a friend’s mother from the Champs D’Elysees in Paris, her last known contact
January 1, 2001
Adriano Araujo da Silva got rid of her body from his apartment by throwing it out a window and
dragging it to a spot 120 metres from his home.
January 2
Jeanette’s body is found. Police investigate, but leads prove fruitless.
2007
Using new technology, a DNA sample is extracted from material found under Jeanette’s
fi ngernails and is registered with France’s DNA database.
February 2008
Da Silva runs a police roadblock because he is uninsured and unlicensed. He later goes to
police claiming the vehicle was stolen. They do not believe him and take his DNA. The sample
waits for months to be crosschecked.
February 2, 2009
French policewoman Cathy Nicol receives a call from a magistrate saying the DNA on Jeanette’s
fi le now has a match.
February 17
Da Silva is arrested
February 18
He phones his girlfriend, in front of police, and confesses to Jeanette’s killing.
February 19
He confi rms his confession, saying: “I know I am a criminal.”
April
He retracts his admissions, saying he was manipulated by police, who told him if he confessed he would receive only eight years’ jail.
January 6, 2012
He is found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years’ jail. He says he will appeal his conviction.

First published in The Sunday Age.

Reporter lifts lid on tabloid’s murky world

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Editors knew of hacking, inquiry told

FOR anyone who watched the phone hacking scandal unfold and wondered, “What were those journalists thinking?”, eye-watering answers have come from a former reporter at the News of the World, who says editors including “criminal-in-chief” Rebekah Brooks had encouraged the “perfectly acceptable” practice.
On Tuesday, Paul McMullan gave brutally frank evidence about the mindset at the now defunct tabloid paper to Britain’s Leveson inquiry into media practices. He said:
■Former editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking, and their denials made them “the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it”.
■Only evil people needed privacy: “Privacy is for paedos.”
■Hacking was “perfectly acceptable” given the need to find the truth and the sacrifices reporters made for their careers.
McMullan, who worked at the paper as a reporter and deputy features editor for seven years until 2001, also said hacking into the voicemails of murdered girl Milly Dowler was “not a bad thing” as journalists had been trying to help find her: “Our intentions were good; our intentions were honourable.”
It was a dramatic day at the inquiry, with former tabloid journalists presenting like sinners at the pearly gates, either full of repentance or full of bluster over their misdeeds.
McMullan is the first journalist to defend to the inquiry the techniques used by News of the World, which was shut down because of the hacking scandal. He painted a portrait of thrill-seeking reporters pushed by editors to breach boundaries for the sake of stories.
But another former tabloid reporter, Richard Peppiatt of the Daily Star, apologised for intrusive and inaccurate stories and said: “I am ashamed.” He said reporters on that paper had been “cannon fodder” for editors and proprietors.
However, McMullan, asked whether he believed no one should have privacy, answered: “Yes.”
He went on: “In 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never actually come across anyone who’s been doing any good. Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in. Privacy is evil; it brings out the worst qualities in people. Privacy is for paedos [paedophiles]. Fundamentally, nobody else needs it.”
McMullan blasted great holes in the earlier evidence given to Parliament by Mrs Brooks and Mr Coulson, who had strongly denied knowledge of hacking. He told the inquiry hacking was widespread at the paper because “Coulson brought the practice wholesale with him when he was appointed deputy editor, an appointment I could not believe”.
Mr Coulson was editor from 2003 to 2007, when he resigned after the paper’s royal reporter and a private investigator were jailed for hacking voicemail accounts of the royal family.
Mr Coulson had claimed the practice was confined to “a single rogue reporter”. He was later hired as media adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron but resigned in January, saying pressure over hacking was preventing him from doing his job.
McMullan said editors threw reporters “to the wolves” by denying they knew about hacking. Apparently offended by this alleged breach of honour, he said: “They should have had the strength of their conviction to say, ‘I know, yes, sometimes you have to enter a grey area or enter a black illegal area for the good of our readers, for the public good, and yes, we asked our reporters to do these things.’
“But, instead, they turned around on us and said, ‘Oh, we didn’t know they were doing it. Oh, heavens. It was all just [royal reporter] Clive Goodman.’ And later, ‘It was just a few others.’
“They should have been the heroes of journalism, but they aren’t. Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson . . . are the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it.”
Making the most of his moment in the spotlight, McMullan also launched a broadside at Mr Cameron for “cosying up” to News International executives: “David Cameron wants to become prime minister and he ends up with Murdoch lite, James [Murdoch], and Rebekah Brooks.” He said Mr Cameron had been “moulded” by Mrs Brooks, who became chief executive of the paper’s owner, News International.
He said hacking should not be limited to intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6: “For a brief period of about 20 years we have actually lived in a free society where we have hacked back. And if you start jailing journalists for that, then this is going to be a country that is laughed at by Iran and China and by Turkey.”
He spoke of his “absolute” love of celebrity pursuits: “How many jobs can you actually have car chases in?” But, he added, “The glory days when it was so much fun before [Princess] Diana died have gone.”
He said he had received death threats: “I sacrificed a lot to write truthful articles for the biggest-circulation English-language paper in the world, and I was quite happy and proud to do it, which is why I think phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool . . .”
In contrast, Peppiatt apologised to celebrities including singer Susan Boyle. He said a number of stories during his time at the Star were “completely fictitious”. He claimed that after he left the paper and told his story to The Guardian, he was threatened and his work emails intercepted.
McMullan said he saw no difference between the public interest and what the public was interested in, and that sales figures were the only reliable indicator of what was acceptable. “The public are clever enough to be judge and jury for what goes on in newspapers.”
His defiance bodes ill for the attempts of media proprietors to keep their industry self-regulated, a cause they equate with the democratic freedom of the press. Perhaps the sharpest nail in that coffin yesterday came from one of the strongest examples of the benefits of open media, Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies.
His work was central in exposing phone hacking, but he told the inquiry he could no longer support self-regulation: “I don’t think this is an industry that is interested in, or capable of, self-regulation.”
Police investigating phone hacking said yesterday they had arrested a woman, 31, on suspicion of conspiring to intercept voicemail messages.
University lecturer Bethany Usher, who worked at the News of the World and The People, was being questioned at a police station in Northumbria, sources said.First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Book casts new light on Ireland’s dark past

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IT IS a wild, wet night, and inside Kilmainham Gaol the wind wails through the steel girders on the roof. It produces an unearthly, keening howl, so eerie that many tourists mistake it for man-made sound effects, but the grim fortress of Kilmainham has never needed help with atmosphere.
Kilmainham is now a museum but it once housed generations of Irish political rebels. Most of the young leaders of Ireland’s proudest rebellion, the Easter Rising, were executed here after being held in the dark, dank, cells of what is now called the 1916 Corridor.
This night, it is again filled with Irishmen who were jailed by the British. They should have notified the Guinness book of records, jokes host Ruan O’Donnell, historian and author of a new book on the Irish Republican Army: “We might have claimed the record for the highest number of prisoners trying to get back into a jail.”
Standing in the glare of the fluorescent lights of the newer west wing are 140 people, including dozens of greying, unremarkable-looking men who have done time in British jails for offences linked to the IRA violence of the 1970s and 1980s. They are here for the launch of Dr O’Donnell’s book, which documents the story of 200 such men: Special Category: The IRA in English Prisons. Volume I, 1968-78. Dr O’Donnell is a lecturer in history at the University of Limerick. He completed his PhD — on Irish republicans transported to Australia — at the Australian National University.
He says he wrote Special Category because that aspect of Ireland’s history was undocumented but had been significant; IRA attacks on British soil received far more media and political attention than violence in Northern Ireland. He believes IRA attacks in Britain were critical to the advancement of the Northern Ireland peace process: “The bombing of Canary Wharf [in London in 1996] removed many pre-conditions and obstructions to the peace process by the British government.”
But even in Ireland, the modern IRA is not regarded in the same heroic light as the IRA that fought in Ireland’s War of Independence. What was it like to sit in a room with men who had killed and listen to their stories?
“I have a very strong sense of this balance in the realm of history,” he says. “I had no equivocation about speaking to prime movers. It’s 30 years old; it’s not political in that sense any more.”
The IRA men who moved to England lived like ghosts, talking little, leaving no fingerprints, avoiding photographs. They knew that arrest would mean a life sentence but still they did it.
John McComb, 58, spent 17 years in jail for conspiring to cause an explosion.
He says he joined the IRA as a teenager after he experienced British troops saturating his Belfast neighbourhood with “gas”: “Old-age pensioners were rolling on the floor. Babies in prams were in convulsions. You saw it every day on the news.”
Asked how he sees his life, looking back now, he says, “I’m proud to be a member of the IRA. Of course the IRA made mistakes and tragedies happened, and there’s a collective responsibility for that if you are part of an organisation, but we tried to have a clean war. We tried to give a warning before every operation. ”
He approves of the peace process and thinks it has improved equality between Catholics and Protestants. Does he think there will ever be a united Ireland? He smiles: “It’s a work in progress.”

Scandal stalks race for Irish presidency

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THE campaign to be the ninth president of Ireland has been distinguished by the rattling of skeletons in closets, with two candidates now carrying bruises from old bones that fell out of cupboards and into the glare of the media.
Following a series of controversies, big names have been left trailing in the final week of campaigning before Thursday’s vote, and a relative outsider, Sean Gallagher, has leapfrogged to the top of the list alongside grand old man Michael D. Higgins.
“It has been a nasty and insubstantial campaign and the result is a little like ‘last man standing’,” says Adrian Guelke, professor of comparative politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. “The candidates who have offended the least have got to the top. Michael D. and Sean Gallagher don’t offend lots of people.”
Current President Mary McAleese, a barrister and academic admired for her skilled peacemaking, was re-elected for a second term unopposed seven years ago.
She built bridges with Northern Ireland and arranged an almost penitential visit by the Queen to the republic earlier this year. The Queen laid wreaths at sites memorialising Irish freedom fighters and visited the stadium where the 1920 Bloody Sunday massacre took place.
Mrs McAleese’s predecessor, Mary Robinson, was also a visionary, held in affection for transforming the ceremonial role into one with more warmth and meaning. She emphasised the needs of the marginalised and reached out to the Irish diaspora.
The bar is now set high — possibly too high for two well-known candidates whose campaigns have been tarnished by sexual allegations.
“Dana” Rosemary Scallon is so well known from her singing career that she goes by her stage name. She won a seat in the European Parliament stressing opposition to divorce and abortion and has had two previous tilts at the presidency.
But she is involved in a bitter family row over allegations by her sister, Susan Stein, that a brother abused Mrs Stein’s daughter as a child. Mrs Scallon last week said the allegations had emerged in the context of a court dispute over other matters in 2008 and had now “conveniently” re-emerged. She said she was sure they were malicious and untrue.
In response, Mrs Stein this week hired a libel lawyer. She claimed she had told Mrs Scallon about the alleged abuse when it was first disclosed years ago but Mrs Scallon had advised her to “protect the family name” by not telling others.
“Dana had a very respectable showing last time but she’s in complete meltdown now,” says John Waters, author and columnist for The Irish Times.
David Norris, the first openly gay person elected to public office in Ireland, had been a front-runner. But he withdrew in July after it emerged that in 1997 he wrote a letter to Israeli authorities pleading on behalf of former partner Ezra Yitzhak Nawi, who had been convicted of the statutory rape of a teenage boy.
Mr Waters says: “It’s been watered down as a letter for clemency, but it was a letter in which he misrepresented the situation because he didn’t allude at all to the fact that this was his [former] lover.”
Mr Norris has since re-entered the race and people are divided between those concerned about his judgment and those who see him as hounded by the media.
Still in with a chance is former IRA chief Martin McGuinness, who left his job as deputy chief minister in Northern Ireland, the culmination of his work in the peace process. He has said that the Irish are angry at the way the debt crisis has led to loss of sovereignty to the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.
“It is time for a president who will stand up for Ireland and the Irish people,” he said. “Ireland needs a new beginning, and I do new beginnings.”
He has also promised to be president for “the 32 counties” — republican code for a united Ireland, as there are 26 counties in the republic and six in Northern Ireland. It is not clear how he plans to do this.
Waters thinks Mr McGuinness has not stood up well to strong criticism over his paramilitary past, but Professor Guelke thinks those attacks are unfortunate: “The case is being made that he is morally unsuitable because of his past . . . People in [Northern Ireland] hear that, and Unionists will ask why he has been imposed on them. It gives legitimacy to the argument that the power-sharing arrangement shouldn’t be in place.”
On the other hand, both analysts see Gay Mitchell, the Fine Gael candidate, as part of the establishment in a country still furious at politicians for allowing the “Celtic tiger” to shrink to a mewling kitten.
Mary Davis’s performance in polls is lacklustre, but she shares some of the qualities of the past two presidents: she is a woman who emphasises caring and inclusion, her own background being decades of work with disabled people.
Which leaves the new guy and the old guy: Mr Gallagher and Mr Higgins. Professor Guelke says of Mr Higgins: “He’s elegant, intelligent, thoughtful . . . The thing that has counted against him is that he looks old. He does come across as an old man.”
And at 70, he has to convince voters he can maintain his vigour until he is 78. But he remains a front-runner, along with Mr Gallagher.
“The banana skin that’s waiting for Gallagher is his time in Fianna Fail [the main party of the previous government],” says Mr Waters. “But many people have an association with Fianna Fail and don’t regard it as a criminal offence.
“He’s a very charismatic guy. There’s a particular quality of the Irish personality that outsiders recognise: immediately on contact with another person there is a kind of spark, a warmth, instant banter, and an instant capacity to communicate in a very human, almost intimate way. Gallagher has this quality, and people feel they are meeting the real person.”

A glass of champagne for you … and perhaps a bowl for your jacket?

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LONDON

Reception lines can be staid affairs – but not when Kathy Lette is in the queue . She presented herself to the Queen in a suit screen-printed with corgis, their tiny eyes glittering with red, green or blue beads.
“Do you like it?” she asked the Queen, of the outfit commissioned from her mate with a sewing machine in Cronulla. “I wore it specially for you.” She says the Queen looked down and her eyes widened: “Philip!” she said, “Look at this!”
“You’ll have to move on,” he told Lette drily. “It’s too much for me!”
It was a party at the palace for 350 of the best people – in this case, Australian people, as a warm-up to the royal tour of Australia by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh due to start on Wednesday.
Lette, Australia’s comic chicklit queen, was carrying a handbag in the shape of a pot of geraniums. She was accompanied by her husband, Geoffrey Robertson, QC. The mellifluous Mr Robertson is a human-rights lawyer known best to Australians for his mental gymnastics on former ABC TV show Hypothetical. He is waiting for the judgment in the case of a high-profile client, Wikileaks leader Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.
Elle Macpherson came dressed all in nude (no, not the nude, but the flesh colour in mode with fashionistas). Arriving at the palace, she was asked how she thought the Queen would fare as a contestant on popular television show Britain’s Next Top Model.
Macpherson, who has put out a range of designer underwear, joked the Queen would look “awesome in my undies”. In fact the Queen was her usual dignified self in a purple brocade suit.
Entertainer Rolf Harris was a late withdrawal due to illness, along with rugby league player Danny Buderus who couldn’t get a flight from Greece. Kylie Minogue could not make it but her former Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan was among the crowd in the state apartments at Buckingham Palace, along with designer Collette Dinnigan, singers Nick Cave and Gabriella Cilmi, actor Hugh Jackman, rugby league player Matt King, and Socceroos Tim Cahill and Mark Schwarzer.
Also mingling was actor Greta Scacchi, who is returning to Sydney in two weeks to prepare for ensemble performances of David Williamson’s new play, Nothing Personal.
Palace staff prepared trays of drinks and food – including Tasmanian sparkling wine, tiny lamingtons and coin-sized passionfruit pavlovas – in the red-brocade throne room.
Britons delicately inquired of Australians as to the warmth of the welcome the royal couple might receive. They were assured the republican tide was out at the moment, and Australians were not harbouring the kind of fervent nationalism that is inflaming some Scottish hearts.
The Queen and Prince Philip travel to Canberra on Wednesday for a 10-night Australian tour. They will visit Brisbane and Melbourne before opening the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Perth.

First published in The Age.

Amanda Knox: Nightmare over, now book deals wait at home

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THE family of the murdered girl was bereft; the family of the alleged murderer jubilant.
After judges in the Italian hill town of Perugia declared convicted murderer Amanda Knox not guilty on appeal, her sister Deanna said briefly outside court: “We’re thankful that Amanda’s nightmare is over. She has suffered four years for a crime she didn’t commit.”
Ms Knox, an American, was expected to fly home to Seattle yesterday, where she is expected to receive offers for multimillion-dollar book and movie deals about her ordeal. American TV networks are already in a bidding war for her first interview.
Ms Knox’s mother and other family members were seen at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport yesterday, where Ms Knox was expected to join them to board a British Airways flight to London late in the morning and then catch a connection there for the US.
But for the family of the woman she was accused of murdering, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, there is no joy in the legal decision that overturned Ms Knox’s conviction and 26-year jail sentence.
They said in a statement: “We respect the decision of the judges but we do not understand how the decision of the first trial could be so radically overturned. We still trust the Italian justice system and hope that the truth will eventually emerge.”
At an earlier press conference Ms Kercher’s sister Stephanie said her “brutal murder” was being overlooked: “I think Meredith has been hugely forgotten.” Her brother Lyle said: “It is very hard to find forgiveness at this time. Four years is a very long time but on the other hand it is still raw.”
In the same verdict judges acquitted Ms Knox’s alleged partner in crime, her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The two had been convicted of raping and murdering Ms Kercher, an English exchange student, in the bedroom of a cottage the two women shared in Perugia in 2007.
The case sparked lurid language and an almost lascivious fascination both inside and outside Italy’s justice system, which has been disgraced by the finding. Judges have yet to give their reasoning but it is thought they relied on the evidence of experts who testified that the original investigation had been botched, with more than 50 errors in the slovenly handling of DNA evidence. The acquittal can still be appealed to the Italian Supreme Court, and prosecutors confirmed that they will do that.
The two judges, sitting with a six-person jury, were clearly not swayed by the venomous language of the lawyer who had painted Ms Knox as a she-devil for initially falsely blaming her employer, bar owner Patrick Lumumba, for killing Kercher.
Mr Lumumba was arrested and jailed for two weeks after Ms Knox claimed she had heard him enter Ms Kercher’s room and then clapped her hands over her ears to muffle screams. Mr Lumumba’s lawyer told the court: “The woman you see before you today is charming [and] angel faced … [but] she was a diabolical, demonic she-devil. She was muddy on the outside and dirty on the inside. She has two souls, the clean one you see before you, and the other.” He also claimed: “She is borderline. She likes alcohol, drugs, and she likes wild, hot sex.”
Borderline personality is a serious psychiatric disorder involving severe mood swings, chaotic personal relationships and sometimes dissociation.
Police had become suspicious early on because of reportedly strange behaviour by Ms Knox, who had allegedly performed cartwheels and splits while waiting to be questioned and who had gone shopping for a g-string the day after the killing, where she was heard promising her boyfriend wild sex.
She was found to have lied about Mr Lumumba. Judges this week sentenced her to three years’ jail for slandering him. She was freed because she has already served four years jail, although she must also pay him €22,000 ($30,600) in damages.
Ms Knox said she lied only after being bullied and cuffed by police, who questioned her without a lawyer present. Ms Knox’s parents reportedly mortgaged their homes to pay her legal fees.
Mobile phone records suggested that she and her boyfriend had been near the scene at the time of the killing and turned off their phones for three hours around the time Ms Kercher is thought to have died.
Prosecutors at one point suggested the killing was the result of an attempted sex game and that Ms Kercher had been raped and killed for refusing to play. But this theory did not fit with the fact that the courts also convicted an Ivory Coast drifter, Rudy Guede, of the killing after DNA samples at the scene were matched to him. Ms Knox barely knew Mr Guede and Mr Sollecito had not met him.
Ms Knox’s father, Curt, said after her conviction that “the attacks on Amanda’s character … overshadowed the lack of evidence in the case against her”.
Ms Knox thanked those “who shared my suffering and helped me survive with hope,” in a letter to a foundation that seeks to promote ties between Italy and the US and which has always championed her cause, Associated Press reported.
Her supporters in America, where she is expected to take part in a $US1 million ($1.03 million) interview, greeted her acquittal with delight. In Seattle, supporters holding vigil hugged, wept and cheered when the verdict was announced.
They were not alone. Ms Knox, who had been rushed sobbing from the courtroom by guards, was returned briefly to jail to be formally released. “There was a huge cheer … an ovation from every cell,” one of her supporters, the Italian MP Rocco Girlanda, told journalists. “Everyone was shouting ‘libera, libera!’ (Free, free!] It was like being in a football stadium and was something I will never forget. Amanda saluted the other prisoners with a timid wave – she didn’t really know how to react.”

THE ACQUITTED
Amanda Knox has lived under continuous media scrutiny since her arrest and subsequent conviction for the killing of Meredith Kercher. The Seattle-born language student from the University of Washington was studying abroad for a year at the University for Foreigners in Perugia. Knox, now 24, polarised opinion. While prosecutors portrayed her as a heartless killer, describing her as a “witch” and a “she-devil, a diabolical person focused on sex, drugs and alcohol”, she has also been dubbed “angel face” by the Italian press. Knox has always insisted that she had no involvement in Kercher’s death. Appealing against her 26-year sentence, she displayed a cautious optimism as defence and forensic experts cast doubt on the DNA evidence that originally helped convict her. Her lawyers claimed she was “crucified” for a crime she did not commit. The case was complicated by Knox’s original statement that she was in the flat while Kercher was murdered. She later retracted this version of events, claiming it was obtained under duress during a hostile interrogation by Italian police. The accusation embroiled her in a slander case and cast doubt on her credibility. In court she spoke of being “afraid of having the mask of a murderer forced on to my skin”. On Monday an Italian jury overturned her conviction. She is expected to return the US as soon as today.

THE VICTIM
Meredith Kercher, 21,
a student from Coulsdon, south London, was described by friends and family as a caring and intelligent young woman. Studying at Leeds University, she was spending a year abroad in the Italian city of Perugia on an exchange program. She shared a flat with Amanda Knox and two Italian women. Kercher was murdered little more than two months after arriving in Italy. Her body was discovered in her bedroom on the afternoon of November 2, 2007 by flatmates and the police. Italian prosecutors in the case claimed she was killed because she refused to take part in a drug-fuelled sex game with Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Friends, family and commentators said that amid the drama of Knox’s appeal, Kercher had been forgotten.

THE CO-ACCUSED
Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s Italian former boyfriend, largely escaped the media frenzy surrounding the case. The young pair met at a classical concert less than two weeks before the murder; Sollecito, 23, was a computer scientist at the University of Perugia. He was later convicted of Kercher’s murder, alongside Knox. Sollecito launched an appeal against his 25-year sentence. His defence portrayed him as shy and naive, while his father, a doctor, said he “wouldn’t hurt a fly”. Doubt was cast on the claim that traces of Sollecito’s DNA were found on Kercher’s bra clip, a key piece of evidence in his conviction. Forensic experts concluded that the sample was too small, and was likely to have been contaminated in the 47-day delay in retrieving the evidence. His conviction was overturned on Monday.

THE CONVICTED KILLER
A small-time drugs trafficker born in the Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede was 20 at the time of the murder. Having moved to Perugia with his father at the age of five, he acquired joint Italian nationality and was portrayed in court as an immigrant who fell into a life of petty crime. Although he denied any involvement in the murder, Guede fled to Germany days after Kercher’s death and spent time on the run before being apprehended for travelling on a train without a ticket. Extradited to Italy to face murder charges, Guede admitted being in Kercher’s home at the time of the murder but denied wrongdoing. He was convicted of murder and sexual assault and sentenced to 30 years, later reduced to 16 on appeal. One of his hand prints, stained with Kercher’s blood, was found on a pillow, on top of which Kercher’s body was lying. Having opted for a speedy trial, his sentence is unlikely to change.
Congo-born Diya ‘Patrick’ Lumumba ran a local bar called Le Chic where Knox occasionally worked. She falsely accused him of the murder soon after Kercher’s death and he was held for two weeks until Guede was arrested. Despite immediately retracting her accusation, Knox was put on trial for defamation and Lumumba was cleared of any involvement.

THE PROSECUTOR
The prosecutor at the time Knox and Sollecito were sentenced, Giuliano Mignini was convicted of abuse in a separate investigation and sentenced to 16 months in January 2010. This was instrumental in the shift of public opinion in Knox’s favour in Italy and abroad. Due to uncertainty around the outcome of Knox’s appeal, Mignini retained his job and acted as a consultant for the prosecution. He has brought a series of criminal slander charges against critics in Italy and the US.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.