Indian to be tried for rape and murder of Scottish backpacker
AN Indian man is set to stand trial next month accused of raping and murdering Scots-born backpacker Danielle McLaughlin after police closed their investigation.
Miss McLaughlin, 28, was strangled and her face was slashed with a broken beer bottle after she had spent the day at a festival in the holiday resort of Goa.
Local man Vikhat Bhagat reportedly confessed to police following his arrest but last month he wrote a 29-page open letter denying he was responsible and insisting others carried out the attack.
Glasgow-born Miss McLaughlin’s family have supported Bhagat’s claims that whoever killed her did not act alone but Indian police have dismissed their assertions.
Officers have now filed the charge sheet against Bhagat, formally closing their investigation and paving the way for his trial to begin.
They say Bhagat, 23, who is understood to have a long criminal record, knew Miss McLaughlin from previous visits she had made to the country.
The pair were seen together on CCTV in the hours before her death and Bhagat was arrested soon after her body was found in a field on March 14.
Deputy Superintendent Sammy Taveres said: ‘We have filed a charge sheet against Vikat Bhagat in the case of rape and murder of Danielle McLaughlin. We have requested the court to begin the trial as soon as possible but we do not know yet when it would be commenced.’
The 374-page charge sheet includes statements from 68 witnesses.
Bhagat has retracted his confession, claiming it was beaten out of him by police who forced him to incriminate himself by putting his fingerprints on beer bottles.
He has insisted he was in love with Miss McLaughlin and that three of his friends killed her.
According to Bhagat, he and Miss McLaughlin were drunk and smoking cannabis in a restaurant on the night of her murder. He claimed the pair were going to join friends of his but stopped to smoke at a regular haunt, where she was later found murdered.
In his letter, he allegedly wrote: ‘I saw two bikes coming towards us switching off the headlights. They came to me. When I questioned why they were here, [a friend] asked me to tell Danielle to have sex with them.’
Bhagat wrote that Danielle then slapped one of the men, who stripped and raped her before beating her with beer bottles.
The accused’s sister Geeta Bhagat, a 25-year-old hospital nurse, said: ‘My brother is being framed.
‘He has told me in the letter that he informed the cops of the involvement of three other men but the police did not listen to him. Instead they gave him electric shock in his calf muscles and asked him to touch the broken beer bottles for fingerprints.’
Lawyer Vikram Varma, who had been assisting the McLaughlin family, said they also suspect more than one person was involved.
Police interviewed the three men named by Bhagat but ruled them out of the investigation.
In March, Miss McLaughlin’s funeral took place in Donegal, Ireland, where the family had moved from Scotland.
Friends and family from Australia, New Zealand, Scotland and England dressed in colourful clothes in tribute to ‘a vibrant free spirit, the little girl who became the lovely woman’.
Father Francis Bradley told mourners Miss McLaughlin had made ‘a huge impression on people’s lives’.
‘My brother is being framed’