Empathise with Nirbhaya's mother: Mackeown

Britisher Fiona Mackeown, whose teenage daughter was sexually abused before her death in Goa in 2008, on Sunday said she shared the pain of the mother of late Nirbhaya whose rapists are awaiting gallows in the 2012 case.

Eleven years after Mackeown's daughter Scarlett Eden Keeling was found dead at Anjuna beach in Goa in February 2008, the Bombay High Court in 2019 convicted local resident Samsun D'Souza and sentenced him to imprisonment for ten years.

With Nirbhaya's mother demanding that the four convicts be hanged one by one so that they understand what it meant to toy with the law, Mackeown on Sunday said the wait for closure is "horrible".

"It is horrible thing for someone to undergo such a long wait. I can relate myself with the pain faced by Nirbhaya's mother, who is still waiting for the convicts to be hanged, even seven years after she lost her daughter," Mackeown told PTI on Sunday.

She is in Goa along with her another daughter, Isisi Celeste Storm, who was just 11 when Scarlett was killed.

"It is painful for the family of victims to wait for justice for such a long period of time. It does not look good on the part of judicial system (which is supposed to be) dealing with it (the case) quickly and efficiently," she said.

Mackeown said she had been following the Nirbhaya case for long.

"I had seen a documentary on that case in England," she recalled.

Mackeown, who visited the Anjuna beach along with her lawyer on Sunday, said her daughter Isisi was feeling little "insecure and apprehensive" in Goa.

She is also supporting the cause of Irish woman Andrea Brannigam, whose daughter Danielle McLaughing was killed in south Goa in the year 2017.

The warrant for execution of death sentence for all the four convicts in the Nirbhaya rape and murder case has been fixed on February 1 at 6 am.

The 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012, in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people before she was thrown out on the road. She was flown to a hospital in Singapore where she died.