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Mauritius honeymoon murder:
We're not even safe in paradise
 

HOMEPAGE NEWS REPORTS INDEX MISSING NEWS JANUARY 2011
Original Source: TELEGRAPH: THURSDAY13 JANUARY 2011
7:00AM GMT 13 Jan 2011
 

The murder of newlywed Michaela McAreavey was a truly unimaginable horror, says Judith Woods

Michaela Harte
L-R Mickey Harte, John McAreavey, Michaela Harte, Bishop John McAreavey and Brendan McAreavey on the wedding day of Michaela Harte and John McAreavey

Paradise lost, a honeymoon-descended-into-hell, a radiant bride senselessly murdered on a palm-fringed island idyll. It's the raw material of a dark Hollywood thriller that taps into our deepest, most irrational fears ' or at least it was, until yesterday.

The news that Michaela McAreavey, 27, daughter of Gaelic football legend Mickey Harte, was murdered at her luxury hotel in Mauritius was utterly shocking, the grim details all the more heart-rending when juxtaposed with her joyful wedding photograph, taken on December 30.

A former Northern Irish beauty queen, she taught Irish at St Patrick's girls academy in my own home town of Dungannon, in County Tyrone, where she was both enormously liked and hugely respected. I know the school well, and can imagine the sense of numb horror that must now grip pupils and teachers alike, its repercussions rippling across the wider community like a breeze on a burn.

That a blameless young woman's life should be snuffed out in our closest approximation to Eden is almost impossible to grasp. I have holidayed on Mauritius and can confirm that this gem, set in the lapis waters of the Indian Ocean is, indeed, the stuff of fantasies. If we're not safe there, where are we safe'

Softly lapping turquoise water, icing sugar sand, palm trees set just so, the horizon is a gentle meniscus of endless possibility.

And it is this sense of possibility, of a happy-ever-after to be seized by a young couple embarking on life's most exciting, most challenging adventure ' marriage ' that has been obliterated. Their 'in sickness and in health' wedding vows still echoing, death has parted them far, far sooner than anyone could have anticipated.

When I visited Mauritius, in 2006, I was with my elder daughter, then aged three. As she was too tired from the day's giddy excitements to stay up past supper, I would tuck her into bed before heading off, without a second's thought, to dine with friends.

A year later, Madeleine McCann was taken from an Algarve holiday apartment in Praia da Luz. Her appalling abduction robbed a family of their daughter and every parent of their prelapsarian innocence ' their naivety ' that far-flung locations were automatically safer, strangers kinder, risks lower than at home.

I shudder now to think of having left my child ' albeit inside a locked hotel room ' alone in what is, for all the fluffy white bath robes, a developing nation, where petty crime has an altogether more desperate, vicious edge. My hotel was luxurious to a fault, peopled with a vast number of smiling staff and well-heeled guests; does that make it less likely or more likely to be targeted by criminals'

Michaela McAreavey was killed because she disturbed an intruder (or intruders) in her room. She was found by her husband, Gaelic footballer John McAreavey, who had been waiting for her in the restaurant. He encountered a scene that will haunt him forever.

The police on the island report that Harte ' so serene, so dazzling in her wedding gown ' had put up a fierce fight for her precious life. Three suspects have been charged with her murder; a few minutes later and they would merely have been guilty of theft.

Much is written about the banality of evil, but what of the trivial decisions we take that alter the course of our lives irrevocably' Harte had gone to the room to fetch some biscuits to have with a cup of tea, an impulse that brought her into unimaginable danger. How could she have known' How could anyone be prepared for such a random event'

It seems morbid to suggest that no amount of planning or painstaking effort or financial outlay can ever fully protect us ' but it is true, nonetheless.

In 2008, British honeymooners Ben and Catherine Mullany were murdered on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Their funeral was held in the same church where they had married a month earlier. They, too, were victims of a robbery gone terribly wrong.

When retired Kent couple Paul and Rachel Chandler set off round the world on their yacht, how their friends must have envied them. But in 2009, while sailing from the Seychelles to Tanzania, they were captured by Somali pirates, and spent 338 harrowing days in captivity, which was ended only with the payment of a ransom demand.

Critics claim their route had taken them into Somali waters notorious for pirate attacks, and hinted, harshly, they were the architects of their own misfortune. Had the Chandlers guessed at the ramifications of plotting that course, they would have acted differently; and who among us hasn't made an unforeseen error of judgement that has had serious, if not downright tragic consequences'

I married abroad, on a cliff in St Lucia, overlooked by the island's pitons, twin volcanic plugs that rear up into the vaulted blue skies. I am pleased to report absolutely nothing of note happened. But friends who had travelled to New Orleans around the same time, ended up getting pistol-whipped and robbed in their hotel room.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn' Probably not, other than a reminder of the fragility of life and a bittersweet, but necessary, reminder that the carefree moments we let our guard down are sometimes the moments when we need it most.

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