HAVING linked the murder of Michaela McAreavey to Anni Dewani, Judith Woods now links it to Madeleine McCann. Woods starts off by blurring fiction with fact:Paradise lost, a honeymoon-descended-into-hell, a radiant bride senselessly murdered on a palm-fringed island idyll. It’s the raw material of a dark Hollywood thriller that taps into our deepest, most irrational fears – or at least it was, until yesterday.
Michaela McAreavey is dead. She was murdered in what looks like a botched robbery. Avinash Treebhoowoon,Raj Theekoy and Sandip Moneea have been charged with her murder.
But Woods is looking for a deeper meaning.
I have holidayed on Mauritius and can confirm that this gem, set in the lapis waters of the Indian Ocean is, indeed, the stuff of fantasies. If we’re not safe there, where are we safe?
Where are we safe is not on an island that lies a long from home and barely above sea level? The three men mentioned above were nicked pretty fast.
“When I visited Mauritius, in 2006, I was with my elder daughter, then aged three. As she was too tired from the day’s giddy excitements to stay up past supper, I would tuck her into bed before heading off, without a second’s thought, to dine with friends.
And here it is:
A year later, Madeleine McCann was taken from an Algarve holiday apartment in Praia da Luz. Her appalling abduction robbed a family of their daughter and every parent of their prelapsarian innocence – their naivety – that far-flung locations were automatically safer, strangers kinder, risks lower than at home.”
The McCanns were on a private complex. They were not staying in a town centre above a shop. Woods says no parent had any clue about the dangers of funny foreigners before Our Maddie went missing? Madeleine McCann is the benchmark of missing children, but what of Ben Needham (he went missing on the Greek island of Kos in 1991) and Jeremy Vargas (he went missing from Gran Canaria eight weeks before Madeleine McCann vanished)?
Still, this isn’t really about them or any other victim:
I married abroad, on a cliff in St Lucia, overlooked by the island’s pitons, twin volcanic plugs that rear up into the vaulted blue skies. I am pleased to report absolutely nothing of note happened.
But it might have
http://www.anorak.co.uk/270471/madeleine-mccann/michaela-mcareavey-madeleine-mccann-and-judith-woods-holidays.html
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/relationships/an-escape-from-snoring-hell-1054122.html
http://thestandard.com.hk/weekend_news_detail.asp?pp_cat=36&art_id=51487&sid=14728775&con_type=1&d_str=20070818
http://www.complementarytherapynews.co.uk/feeds/posts/default/4341205039321780988
Attributed to Judith Woods in some appearences, but unattributed in many. Judith Woods is an Irish freelance writer and a Google search on her published articles indicates that she never says anything about actually having paid for any good or service she writes about. A google search on "Judith Woods advertorial" shows that quite a bit of her material is actually classified as advertorial on publishers web sites!
