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| Sunday, 9 November 2003 |
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British girls probably asphyxiated, court told LONDON, Saturday (Reuters) British schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, who disappearance and death last year made headlines around the world, were probably asphyxiated and their bodies later set alight, a court was told on Friday. Britain was horrified by the double death in August last year of the two 10-year-olds last seen alive wearing matching red soccer jerseys. The burned and decomposed bodies of the girls were found by chance after two weeks, side by side in a remote drainage ditch. Former school caretaker Ian Huntley denies murdering the girls but the prosecution has said he is likely to concede they went into his house on the evening they vanished and died there. Prosecutor Richard Latham says it was murder. "Ten year old girls don't just drop dead," he told the jury at London's Old Bailey on Friday. The naked bodies of the two youngsters had been dumped side-by-side in a woodland ditch near Lakenheath in Suffolk, eastern England, Latham said. The bodies were so badly decomposed that the actual cause of death was impossible to establish and the possibility the pair had been sexually assaulted could not be ruled out. Latham said Huntley, 29, who knew the area, went to the ditch, about 15 miles from his home in the village of Soham, on two occasions - once to dump the girls and again three days later to burn their bodies in a bid to erase DNA evidence. Latham said fibres from the girls' distinctive red Manchester United football shirts had been found on Huntley's clothes and on the carpets in his house. Pollen from the ditch had also been discovered on Huntley's car and on a can of petrol in the boot. Earlier, the prosecutor had told the court the ditch had been well chosen since there had been a very "significant possibility" the bodies might never have been found. Latham said the girls' clothes had been cut from their bodies after they had been placed in the ditch. |
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