Magazine gives details of remarriage of French murder victim's husband

The remarriage of Mr Daniel Toscan du Plantier, the widowed husband of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, who was murdered in west Cork in December 1996, was deferred in order not to shock people, according to a French magazine. Mr Toscan du Plantier married the mother of his three-month-old infant daughter last weekend.

The magazine, Paris Match, says that the bride is named Melita and is aged 29. A photograph shows her to be an attractive blonde who wore a white decollete spaghetti-strap dress and a diamond crucifix for the civil ceremony in Auch town hall, 680 kilometres south-west of Paris, near Mr Toscan du Plantier's chateau. The white-haired groom, a well-known film producer, wore a navy blue suit, pale blue shirt and white tie. The actress Isabelle Huppert was his witness.

The bride's witnesses were Jean-Pierre Lavoignat, editor-in-chief of the cinema magazine Studio, and another French actress, Fanny Ardant. After the ceremony on Saturday, the newly weds held a "republican baptism" for their three-month-old daughter, Tosca Toscan du Plantier.

According to Paris Match, the wedding had been postponed "so as not to shock people". A friend of the film producer told the magazine that Mr Toscan du Plantier wanted "to turn the page as quickly as possible". After his late wife's murder, he left the Paris mansion he had shared with her to move in with Melita. When his former in-laws, Georges and Marguerite Bouniol, told Mr Toscan du Plantier that they planned to dedicate a cross in Ireland last weekend to Sophie's memory, he did not tell them of the wedding.

The wedding contrasted sharply with the quiet ceremony in west Cork, where a stone Celtic cross bearing the name "Sophie" was placed below Ms Toscan du Plantier's house at Mizen Head. The cross was blessed last Sunday afternoon by Father Denis Cashman, following a memorial Mass in a nearby church, according to Paris Match. Mr and Mrs Bouniol, Ms Toscan du Plantier's aunt, Marie-Madeleine Opalka, and the murdered woman's 17-year-old son, Pierre-Louis, attended the ceremony. Paris Match identified "Detective Pat Goy and his wife Mary" and "Superintendent J.P. Twomey" and "an investigator" as being among the gathering.

Mr Toscan du Plantier has been extremely critical of the way Irish authorities have handled the investigation into his late wife's murder. No one has been charged with her killing. In an interview with Le Figaro last February, he spoke of "a devil in the hills of Ireland". He admitted that he was living with a young woman who was expecting a child, saying: "You have to respond to death with life."