Fiona MacKeown has demanded a new investigation into the death of her daughter, Scarlett Keeling, whose bruised and half-naked body was found on a beach in Goa in 2008.
MacKeown has written to the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, asking for the reinvestigation after two men were cleared of raping and killing the 15-year-old British schoolgirl last month.
She told ITV1’s Good Morning Britain: “We’ve written to the prime minister – he seems like a courageous man, he’s making some big changes in India. Ideally, I’d like a reinvestigation, I’d like the police investigated that lied to me and told the other younger policeman to treat it as an accident and not a murder.
“I’d like the ministers who delayed the handing over to the CBI [the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s elite national police agency] investigated and then maybe we might get to the bottom of it. That’s my biggest wish, a new investigation.”
A first postmortem examination ruled that Keeling died from accidental drowning, before a second, carried out under pressure from her mother, prompted a fresh investigation to be launched.
The teenager had been visiting the country on a family holiday and attended a Valentine’s Day beach party while the rest of her relatives went travelling.
MacKeown alleged that the investigative process was initially hindered by a reluctance in the Indian criminal justice system to admit a tourist had been murdered.
“It wouldn’t be very good for their tourism and the drug trade over there is huge, it goes right up to some of the ministers and some of the police are involved in it – a huge loss of money,” she said. “The guys directly trying to cover up the murder are involved in the drug trade.”
MacKeown also spoke of how she would “regret for the rest of my life” the decision to let her daughter go to the party alone.
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