Case evolves amid language flaws and jarring laughs

IT WAS 3.40pm when the phone rang at the police station at Grand Gaube, a sleepy fishing village at one of the northern tips of the island of Mauritius.

A woman had died at Legends Hotel. A patrol team was dispatched.

Insp Sunilduth Nucchedy, a wire-framed veteran who hadn’t seen a murder in the village in all of his eight years there, wasn’t far behind.

Insp Nucchedy arrived at the hotel compound at 4.20pm and was led to room 1025, which looked out on the ocean. By now word was beginning to spread on the hotel grounds.

An hour away in Port Louis, officers from the Major Crime Investigation Team, an elite Mauritian unit, were getting into their cars for the drive north.

Insp Nucchedy had the scene cordoned off, took a look around and entered the room. He noticed the bedsheets, a suitcase and some clothes.

“The room was slightly disturbed, and there was a female body dead on the floor,” he recalled. “At the very outset, we thought we had a drowning.”

Slowly but surely, the court is moving closer to the nub of the trial: a short period on January 10th, 2011, between the time when Michaela McAreavey left the Banyan restaurant to return to room 1025 and the time when that call was made to Grand Gaube station.

One of the defence team’s strategies is to probe relentlessly for holes in police procedures.

Technical witnesses who might ordinarily expect to spend 10 minutes on the stand have had their methods scrutinised and pored over for hours.

Insp Nucchedy was the most senior and confident officer to address the court so far, but he too had his evidence interrogated at length.

Sanjeev Teeluckdharry, representing Avinash Treebhoowoon, one of the accused men, zoned in on a diary book from Grand Gaube station which referred to John McAreavey as a “suspect” and said a police sentry had been assigned to stand outside the new room where he stayed the night after his wife died.

Insp Nucchedy did not know why Michaela’s widower had been called a suspect, but the term “sentry” was used by police not only for detainees or accused but also for victims of crime and people who needed a guard for safety reasons.

Rama Valayden, a former attorney general of Mauritius, who is representing the second accused man, Sandeep Moneea, followed up with a rapid-fire hail of short, specific questions about the state of room 1025 when Insp Nucchedy arrived.

What colour was the water in the bathtub, he wanted to know. Clear, the officer replied, except for some reddish traces.

Were there shoe-marks on the bed? No, but there was a small trace of dirt. Did you see a black purse? Yes.

How was the sliding door that looked out on the sea? Closed. Did you check it was locked? No, he replied. And the curtains? Open. A brownish belt? “It was darkish brown.” Was the belt dirty? “I cannot say.” The light was on? Yes. And the air-con? Yes.

And so it continued.

Another target for the defence is Raj Theekoy, the witness who is due to testify that he saw the two accused leaving room 1025 about the time of the killing, and that he heard a woman screaming in pain a few moments earlier.

Yesterday, the court was told of a signed statement given to police by Theekoy, a one-time suspect in the case, on January 11th – the day after the killing. “I don’t know how she was killed . . . I don’t know anything about the lady,” he said. The implication is that Theekoy did not initially tell police about his claims that the two accused were involved.

Yesterday the trial moved into a new phase; police technicians have been dealt with, and now attention is turning to senior officers who led the inquiry. But some of the same patterns persist. Language is a recurring issue.

Yesterday, a continual mix-up over the letters J and G (in French, which is more widely mastered in Mauritius than English, J is pronounced “Jee”, and vice versa) led to confusion over photo exhibits. Then there’s the fondness of Treebhoowoon’s lawyer, Teeluckdharry, for loaded or pejorative terms. When the judge had to correct him for using “manhandle” when he meant “accompany”, it wasn’t entirely clear if it was intentional or inadvertent.

A jarringly jocular tone has broken out now and then during the first six days of the trial.

Sections of the public gallery erupt in laughter every now and then, and the police always let it pass. So had the victim’s family – until yesterday.

When some barbed words between the lawyers sent a ripple of guffaws through the gallery, John McAreavey’s sister Claire finally turned around, raised her voice slightly and asked for some quiet in the courtroom.