Parents Of Murdered Brit Fly To India For Answers

Hear Daniel McGrory on the unanswered questions

The parents of a British tourist murdered in India are to travel to the remote forest where Stephen Bennett was found hanged from a mango tree to discover for themselves why he was killed.

After conflicting accounts from Indian police, his family hope that their appearance at the murder scene will force the authorities to investigate fully this perplexing case.

The riddle over his death deepened further when the woman who police claim mistakenly thought Mr Bennett was trying to rape her insisted she had never even seen him. Nirmala Mene, 25, said that at the time police say she was being molested in the backyard of her home by Mr Bennett she was asleep with her child.

She said that police who came to her village of Malsai bullied her into fixing her thumb-print to a document that officers later claimed was her sworn statement. "I’ve never seen him in my life. I know nothing about his murder or this investigation," she said.

Yet her husband, Ramesh Mene, offered a graphic account from a prison cell of how he used firewood to beat Mr Bennett, 40, an actor from Cheltenham, then throttled him with a woman’s sari and hanged him to make it look like suicide.

Mr Mene, 38, told the Indian Express: "We hit him with whatever we could find before killing him. He was crying and shouting. We were so angry that he had tried to outrage the modesty of my wife that we strangled him."

Detectives at first that a local elder alerted them to the killing. But Gajanan Malusari, the village leader, said: "We didn’t see any Stephen Bennett. In fact no foreigners have ever come to our small town. The police are just looking for scapegoats and found them in our village."

Police are embarrassed by those accusations, saying the woman had changed her story in the hope of freeing her husband. They have charged four men but say that two more of the alleged lynch mob are on the run.

Speaking today, Mr Bennett’s father, Carol, said: "Perhaps our physical presence out there will get to the truth of what really happened to Stephen. Only by being there will we get any proper attention."His mother, Maureen, is convinced that her son was abducted then murdered, but she agonises over the motive.

The family believe that many of the vital clues will be found in Goa, where Mr Bennett went to join two friends on December 2 at Baga Beach. He, John Cronin and Corey Hannon met to scatter the ashes of another friend killed in a motorcycle crash in Goa a year ago.

The Times has retraced Mr Bennett’s days in Goa where he felt threatened by two local men. He did not identify the men but felt so frightened that he booked in at two hotels in different areas of Goa on the same nights.

Staff at the Hotel Palacio di Goa, in Panjim, remember him being very agitated when he checked in on December 6, saying that he did not have his passport. That passport, along with £300 and about £10 worth of local rupees, were found in his pocket after he was hanged.

The last time Mrs Bennett spoke to her son, on December 7, he said he was being followed and was hoping to lose two men. His family want to know who told Indian detectives he had convictions for drug-dealing in the UK. They insist that the father of two young daughters had smoked cannabis in his youth but had no criminal record.

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