Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
UK KAYAKER SHOT, KNIFED & THROWN IN RIVER TO DIE
A BRITISH kayaker shot and stabbed by a drugs gang was still alive when she was thrown into the Amazon, say Brazilian police.
Emma Kelty had been paddling from “source to sea” when she was ambushed, robbed and murdered on September 13.
Police were last night still trying to find Emma’s body.
Yesterday, it emerged the gang’s ringleader had himself been killed.
Evanilson Gomes da Costa, 24, known as Baia, was shot by a rival drug gang and died in hospital.
Police chief Alfonso Barradas Jnr said: “He was in his sister’s house.
“They knew he had gold as well as money belonging to the British woman – and they went to rob him.”
Mr Barradas added: “He is the one who possibly executed the woman by shooting her in her tent.”
Three of the seven-strong gang are in custody and said to have confessed to killing Emma. The others, Erimar Ferreira da Silva and his brothers Nilson and Artur, all in their 20s, are thought to have fled into the jungle.
Police say former headteacher Emma, 43, from Finchley, North West London, was ambushed at around 10pm on Ilha do Boieiro – an island near Coari city.
One of the men told police she was killed for her money, two mobile phones, a tablet, a Gopro camera and a drone. Deputy Chief of Police Ivo Martins said the gang operate “like pirates and go out in a canoe looking to steal. They saw the tent”. He said Emma was resting inside when she was hit by “two shots from a sawn-off shotgun”.
Mr Martins said the gang failed to sink Emma’s kayak with her own knife. He said: “They then placed the victim, we believe still alive, in their canoe and took the boat into the river, where they threw her overboard.”
Emma, who quit as head of Knollmead Primary, in Surbiton, Surrey, to travel, wrote on Facebook she had seen “men with rifles and arrows” by the river the day before she vanished. At 10pm the night she died, she sent a distress signal.