------------------------------------------------------------------------ * * * * * * * * * ANNUAL GOANETTERS MEET * * * * * * * * * ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Goanetters in Goa and visiting meet Jan 6, 2009 at 3.30 pm at Hotel Mandovi (prior to the Goa Sudharop event, which you're also welcome to). Join in for a Dutch dinner -- if we can agree on a venue after the meet. RSVP (confirmations only) 9822122436 or 2409490 or [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GULF-GOANS e-NEWSLETTER (since 1994) Presented by Ulysses Menezes, www.goa-world.com Moderated by Gaspar Almeida Last seen in Goa: The Death of Stephen Bennett The police in Goa called it suicide. But Stephen Bennett's sister believes that thugs controlled by local drugs gangs murdered her brother. David Orr reports from India on a violent crime and botched cover-up that shames a tropical paradise Monday, 5 January 2009 Stephen Bennett's sister believes that thugs controlled by local drugs gangs murdered her brother More pictures On 6 December 2006, three days after he had flown out to Goa on holiday, Stephen Bennett telephoned his mother in Cheltenham. He was in a bad state. Some men had threatened to kill him, he said. He had been abducted from his beach shack the previous night, and beaten. He had just woken up in an alleyway. He thought he had been drugged. He asked his mother to tell his two children how much he loved them and to look after his pets. The Bennett family were beside themselves with worry. On 11 December, a goatherd found his battered body hanging from a mango tree in a remote jungle village 300 miles from the tourist trail. Stephen Bennett was 40, well-travelled and had been in good spirits before leaving for India. During his final days in Goa, Stephen made a total of nine calls to his mother and friends in the UK. He made these calls from roadside phone booths. Had he had his mobile during his final hours, his life might have been saved, but it seems to have been taken from him. Though his SIM card was in his pocket when his body was found, his phone was not. When he made the distress call from the alleyway, his mother says he sounded completely disoriented. At one point, she heard him asking a passer-by where he was and being told he was in Panjim, Goa's state capital. When she suggested he go to the police, he said they had been involved in taking him from his beach hut. He had only a few rupees and a credit card in his pocket. His mother told him to use the credit card to check into a decent hotel, then to get himself on a flight home. According to his version of events in those final calls, and from what has subsequently been discovered by his family, Stephen returned to the shacks on Goa's Baga beach the next morning to collect his bag, money and passport. He had initially been staying at a hotel inland from Baga with two men from Coventry (both of whom are now believed to be back in Britain). He had first met them with one of his brothers at a football match in the UK. Stephen had been planning to go on holiday to Tenerife, but the Coventry pair had told him they were heading to India and suggested he join them for a couple of days. They said they had been there often and could fix him up with a motorbike and somewhere cheap to stay. Stephen accepted their offer and flew out to Goa, arriving on 3 December. He met them at the Skylark bar on Baga beach, as arranged, and checked into Sodders Renton Manor, the hotel where they were staying. The next day, Stephen called a friend in the UK to say that everything was going well – except for a row he had witnessed the previous evening between the Coventry men and some locals. The next morning, he found the Coventry pair had booked out early without leaving a message. Stephen also checked out, and went to the Skylark bar, expecting to see them there with their mates. But he was told they had gone. The barman arranged beach shack accommodation for him at Sunset Cottages, which were owned by his brother. Stephen moved into one of the huts that evening. "Exactly what happened next is unclear," says his sister, Amanda Bennett, from her home in Cheltenham, "but I've gained a pretty good picture from talking to local people, some of whom have been keen to help – though others have lied through their teeth. "Looking back, I realise how innocent we all were. We thought Goa was this lovely sunny place where everyone was relaxed and life was good. We thought the people there were all lovely and honest. Now we know differently." *** Goa's golden beaches have long been a magnet for budget travellers and backpackers. The sun-kissed coastline is the perfect antidote to the long European winter, and it throngs with Western tourists in December and January. Goa has other attractions, too: the living is relatively cheap, and a range of intoxicants – some legal, some not – are on offer. The police tend to turn a blind eye to the activities of foreigners. There are full-moon beach parties, bars stay open till the last customer leaves and everyone seems up for a good time. As the beach attire, tattoos and body piercings on show at every turn suggest, in Goa, anything – or almost anything – goes. But its gilded image has become badly tarnished during the past decade, not least by the botched handling last year of the murder and rape case of British teenager Scarlett Keeling. In November, the rape of a German minor, allegedly by the son of Goa's education minister, further soiled the state's reputation. Corruption and drug dealing are rife. The local media refer to the state's legislative assembly as "the den of 40 thieves". Even as India's best-known paradise resort enjoys another booming tourist season, the Hindustan Times has declared that "fatally romanticised Goa looks rotten to the core". The Bennett family have made several trips to Goa since Stephen's death and have talked to dozens of people – hotel staff, policemen, taxi drivers, residents, tourists, local journalists – in short, anyone who had met Stephen or who could provide an insight into life there. They have also talked to known members of the Goan underworld. "We now know there's a whole seedy underside to life in Goa that a lot of visitors don't see," says Amanda. "An unfortunate minority get caught up in it – as Stephen did. The reason I'm speaking out is because I want other tourists to be warned before they go there expecting paradise." In its investigations, the Bennett family turned up masses of detail regarding Stephen's last days. They learnt that a number of people entered Stephen's hotel room at Baga beach, including at least one policeman, a member of the beach shack staff and a drug baron's thug who also works as a taxi driver. The Bennett family believe the local drugs mafia was involved in the crime; the gangs are well-connected and many of the low-salaried policemen are in their pay. The gangsters – frequently with the connivance of the authorities – prey on the more vulnerable tourists, co-opting them into their web. Some tourists get involved in the drugs racket because they are themselves petty criminals; others are sucked in through naivety or blackmail. Early on in their investigations, Indian police suggested Stephen Bennett was involved in drug dealing. But Amanda believes her brother's only connection to the drugs scene in Goa was the two men from Coventry – but that that was enough to get him killed. "I'm pretty sure the men who attacked him gave him a drug or some cocktail of drugs," she says of her brother's final hours. "But, because of a series of factors – the time delay, the embalming of his body and probably the kind of drugs used – the toxicology test conducted on his body back in the UK didn't reveal anything. Stephen certainly thought he'd been drugged when he telephoned Mum that afternoon from Panjim, telling her the police had forced him from his room the night before and handed him over to some guys who'd threatened to kill him. I don't think he was meant to survive whatever they did to him, it was meant to look like he'd died of an overdose. Anyway, after he'd come to in the alleyway, he checked into a hotel. Opposite was a taxi stand from which, it seems, his every move was watched. We've discovered the vehicle that took Stephen back to Baga to collect his things was run by a mafia goon. The driver – and he's someone we've interviewed several times – then drove Stephen hundreds of miles out of Goa." Stephen was persuaded by the driver that he would not be able to get on a flight at such short notice and was offered a cheap ride to Bombay with two others. Stephen accepted but, as he told his family on the phone, became increasingly suspicious of his fellow passengers. He made his final call to his mother on 7 December from a phone booth in a town called Wadkhal, about 35 miles south of Bombay. He was agitated and said he had to get away from the men in the car. Leaving his bag in the vehicle, he told them he was going for something to eat. Shopkeepers in Wadkhal have told the family that Stephen had a snack, bought some clothes, then went to a bus stop on the edge of town. Night was falling. Later, several people saw him being attacked by two men who hit him over the head and dragged him into a car. A number of the witnesses have admitted they were told by the police not to reveal what they had seen. *** The cover-up appears to have been concerted. "The police got the number of the phone booth changed, then had it knocked down altogether," says Amanda. "But before they did so, we located the booth with the help of the British police and found the register showing Stephen's call to my mother's UK number. This proved he had been in Wadkhal – and not somewhere else as the cops maintained for a whole year. One of the first things we learnt was that the police in Goa just lie – all to protect their paymasters, the drugs mafia." Four days after his last call, Stephen's remains were discovered in the village of Malsai. This hamlet is a collection of huts surrounded by paddy fields and jungle, 45 miles from Wadkhal and 300 miles from Goa. His body was hanging from a mango tree, a sari tied around his neck. Also around his neck was a ligature (this was later confirmed in a police document though both the ligature and the sari – vital pieces of evidence – were left at the scene by the police and later burnt by villagers). His passport was in his pocket, along with other bits and pieces. The shoes and socks he was wearing were not his. The next day, Cheltenham police informed the Bennett family of Stephen's death. "I don't remember much about that time," says Amanda, "It was terrible, a nightmare." Initially, Indian authorities portrayed his death as a drug-induced suicide. The Goan police suggested he was a promiscuous homosexual who had gone to India for sex and drugs. They produced a train ticket which, they said, proved Stephen had been travelling by rail from Goa to Bombay. They suggested he had jumped off the train at a place called Roha and walked five miles through the jungle to the village. But none of the other passengers had seen a foreigner fitting Stephen's description, and the ticket had been bought the day of Stephen's arrival in India. It was valid for travel on 10 December – three days after his death. Eventually, the police "lost" the ticket. A post-mortem examination in India certified that Stephen had died "an unlawful death". It revealed he had suffered a battered skull and a severe beating while alive, and also that he had been strangled with a ligature around 7 or 8 December – three days before his body was discovered hanging from the mango tree. "The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was hopeless from the beginning," says Amanda. "They've consistently misled us and lied to us. I don't think they could be any lower, they are beyond contempt, their main concern is avoiding 'diplomatic incidents'. Surely our own government should be trying to warn its citizens of the dangers facing tourists in places like Goa?" *** The Indian police announced that Stephen had been killed while trying to assault a woman in the village. They produced a woman who said Stephen had tried to rape her when she went to urinate outside during the night. She said her husband had reacted violently, rounding up five villagers who beat the intruder to death. No one could explain why Stephen might have wandered at night into this village in the middle of nowhere – a tiny hamlet rarely visited by foreigners. Six village men were arrested, duly confessed in police custody and then retracted their statements. Malsai residents said the police had used torture to extract the confessions. The woman whose honour the men were supposed to be defending denied all knowledge of a foreigner in the village. No such person had tried to rape her, she corrected, it had all been fabrication by the police who had bullied her into thumb-printing a statement. The family believe Stephen's body was taken to Malsai because at least two villagers had connections with the gang that killed him. The villagers have admitted it was stored in a house for three days, then strung up in the mango tree. Amanda Bennett says she was convinced from the start that her brother had been abducted and killed but it took her a long time to figure out how, who did it and why. "Stephen was a straightforward bloke," says Amanda. "He liked travel and had been to Egypt, China, Turkey and Indonesia. He was educated – with a BA and MA. A bit of an idealist, I suppose. Stephen was a veggie and ate organic food. But he also liked wine and, yes, he'd smoke the odd joint. We've got nothing to hide – he'd received a caution in the UK for growing a cannabis plant on his windowsill. But he wasn't a druggie and didn't hang out in those circles. He enjoyed company. His main job was as a flooring designer but his passions were theatre and film. He moved between Cheltenham and Cornwall where he had a couple of kids by a former partner. He loved his children and, at the time of going to India, had a new girlfriend." Faced with what they suspected to be a police cover-up, the family decided the only way of getting answers was by going out to India. Over the past two years, Stephen's parents, his brother Paul, Amanda and a friend of Stephen's have all made trips making inquiries into the circumstances surrounding his death, building up a network of people who keep them up to date with local information. From the outset, the same cast of Goan underworld characters kept cropping up in their investigation. The list includes the son of a prominent Goan minister (though not the same one whose son is alleged to have recently raped the young German woman). The minister's son on the Bennetts' blacklist has also been linked to the rape and murder of the Devon schoolgirl Scarlett Keeling in the February of last year. The barman Samson D'Souza and racketeer Placido Carvalho, both of them known associates of the politician's son, were arrested for that crime, and have both since been released on bail. Meanwhile, Fiona MacKeown, Scarlett's mother, is no nearer to getting justice for her daughter. "I've been told it was a member of the drugs mafia thugs who ordered Stephen's murder as a warning to the Coventry men who'd run off," says Amanda. "The Coventry guys had been involved in the Goan drugs business for years and owed a large sum of money – £43,000, according to information I've been given. This debt was paid by the Brits within weeks of Stephen's death and they've been told never to return to Goa. All this evidence is with the British police." Drugs play a major role in the Goan economy. They are manufactured in Pune, near Bombay, then shipped through Goa. Tourists, wittingly or unwittingly, become involved. They are used as peddlers, traffickers, mules, in whatever way they can be useful to the local gangsters. Stephen Bennett has never been linked to drug dealing, either in the UK or Goa. There is no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, suggesting that his connection with the men from Coventry had anything to do with drugs. Stephen Bennett's family, however, are convinced that there is a drugs link to his death. They believe that the row he witnessed at his hotel on his first night in Goa was about drugs money. They think the Coventry pair did a runner, leaving Stephen to face the consequences. The editor of a Goan magazine published in London, who wishes to remain nameless, says it is no accident that Stephen's body was strung up in a public, ritualistic way. It was meant to have been found, he says. It was, he reckons, the mafia's way of saying 'This is what happens if you mess with us'. "So, if I know all this, why am I going back to Goa one more time?" asks Amanda Bennett. "There are still loose ends to tie up. The police laughed at us and called us fantasists when we first raised our suspicions. I want them to realise we know the truth. Of course, we'll never get justice in India, but there's at least the satisfaction of exposing the police and being able to reveal what happened to Stephen. And I want to thank all the people who assisted us. What I've learnt has brought me face to face with the worst of human nature – but it's also shown me the good side of humanity, how helpful, friendly and caring some people can be when you're in trouble." Amanda Bennett is planning to return to Goa in February and complete her search for the truth behind her brother's death. (The Independent, UK) Goa World Goa Mog Goa SuRaj Super Goa (em Português) TGF Writers' Sketchpad www.colaco.net www.goa-world. .com/goa/ music/ - The Online Music Station for KONKANI Mahableshwar http://www.mahables hwar.com St. Mary's High School - Mt Abu, Rajasthan India http://www.abusms. com
