Despite no evidence as yet coming to light suggesting foul play, the parents of France-Irish teen Nora Quoirin told Irish broadcaster RTE last night that they believe there was a “criminal element” in their daughter’s disappearance and subsequent death.
Malaysian police classified the crime as a missing person’s case, and a postmortem on the 15-year-old girl with special needs showed that she died of starvation after being stranded in the jungle for over a week.
Nora was found 10 days after having gone missing from her family’s villa at a rainforest resort outside of Kuala Lumpur. Her unclothed body was found in a ravine about two-and-a-half kilometers from where she was last seen.
But despite the police’s conclusions, Nora’s parents have maintained that her learning difficulties made it unlikely she could have wandered so far.
“For us, something very complex happened. We have insisted from the beginning that we believe there was a criminal element to what happened,” they said in an interview yesterday.
Meabh and Sebastian Quoirin insisted that is was “impossible physically, mentally to imagine that she could have got any distance at all.”
“We’re struggling because it was difficult to get resources in place fast enough to investigate a criminal angle,” they told RTE.
They added that Malaysian authorities did not “understand” that Nora had special needs, and had limited communication skills.
The investigation and postmortem showed no signs that Nora had been abducted, and despite the fact that she was found unclothed, autopsy results found no evidence of sexual assault. Instead, officials concluded that Nora had starved and died of upper intestinal bleeding after having gotten lost in the jungle.
Her parents, however, have maintained that they want “truth and justice” in her case. Results from a second postmortem carried out in London have yet to be released.
Nora, along with her parents and two siblings, arrived at a Negri Sembilan resort an hour outside of KL on Aug. 3, but when the family awoke the following morning, the teen was not in the room she shared with her siblings. A window, accessible only from the inside of the house, was open, but few clues indicated what had induced the teen to leave the premises.
Volunteer searchers found Nora’s body two kilometers from the resort after a 10-day search that involved 350 people, including army personnel, members of the public, local indigenous people familiar with the dense jungle, and officials from the UK, France, and Ireland.
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