PANAJI (Web Desk) – An Indian court on Friday cleared two men accused of the rape and homicide of 15-year-old British schoolgirl Scarlett Keeling whose bruised and semi-nude body was found on a Goa beach in 2008.
“I find them not guilty of all charges,” Judge Vandana Tendulkar said after the trial of Samson D’Souza and Placido Carvalho in the state capital Panaji.
D’Souza and Carvalho had been charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, using force with intent to outrage a woman’s modesty and of administering drugs with intent to harm.
Scarlett’s body was found on the popular Anjuna beach in the north of the small Indian tourist state, popular with Western hippies. The teenager’s death in 2008 became international news, shining a spotlight on the seedy side of the resort destination and also drawing attention to India’s sluggish justice system.
Police initially dismissed her death as an accidental drowning but opened a murder investigation after MacKeown pushed for a second autopsy which proved she had been drugged and raped. It showed that Keeling had suffered more than 50 injuries to her body.
The trial began in 2010 but was dogged by numerous delays, including hearings of just one afternoon a month due to a backlog of cases and a public prosecutor withdrawing from proceedings. A key witness, Briton Michael Mannion, known as “Masala Mike”, also refused to testify, dealing a huge blow to the prosecution’s case. He had initially spoken of seeing D’Souza lying on top of Keeling on the beach shortly before she died.
MacKeown and her family were on a six-month holiday to India when she, Keeling and her other daughters went on an excursion to the southern state of Karnataka, but Keeling later returned alone to attend a party. Her body was found on the morning of February 18, 2008.
