| Flowers in Gods Garden
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09/01/02
- Screaming her innocence, the aunt who killed Victoria
Paul Harris reports
Daily Mail
SHE called her 'my little daughter', the child she claimed
to have loved and cared for through much of her pathetically
short life. To hear her speak, you might have thought
that Marie Therese Kouao might now have an ounce of remorse
for Victoria Climbie, the eight-year-old girl who died
such a terrifying death at her hands.
She was not a monster, she kept telling us, and had nothing
to with Victoria's murder. Nothing to do with forcing
her to eat excrement or scalding her with boiling water.
She never burned her with cigarettes, she never left her
to freeze in a bin-liner.
Even if you were gullible enough to believe a word of
her protestations of innocence yesterday, you might have
found a certain irony in the fact that even Victoria's
killer was now blaming everyone else for her death.
After all, that is precisely what most of the professional
bodies which effectively allowed an innocent child to
die have been doing. It was the reason Kouao was ordered
to interrupt her life sentence at Durham prison yesterday
to give evidence at the official inquiry into what went
wrong.
Evidence, as it turned out, was probably too strong a
word. What Kouao did instead was to harangue the inquiry
for several hours about injustice, victimisation and,
as she repeatedly insisted, her innocence. Pictures showing
burn marks on the child's face - among 128 injuries found
on her body - were 'fakes', she maintained, and it was
the doctors who had killed her with poor medical practices.
To the lay observer, none of this seemed to take the Victoria
Climbie inquiry - five months and 110 witnesses on - forward
much. It certainly failed to impress Francis and Berthe
Climbie, the parents who entrusted their daughter to the
care of Kouao, her great aunt, in the hope she would get
a better education in England than in her native Ivory
Coast.
After listening for as long as she could bear to Kouao's
'testimony', Mrs Climbie fought back tears outside the
inquiry room to declare: 'If Marie Therese Kouao loved
my daughter, then my daughter would be in my arms today'
It was about the first time anyone had made sense.
Kouao had been ordered to appear at the hearing in London
after refusing to help investigators who questioned her
in jail. It was the first time she had spoken publicly
about the case - and it is believed to be the only time
a convicted killer has talked to an inquiry about their
crime.
Witness number 111 was escorted by prison officers into
the inquiry at Hannibal House, in Elephant and Castle,
to sit just a few feet in front of Victoria's parents.
It took ten minutes of sometimes angry exchanges before
counsel Neil Garnham QC and chairman Lord Laming persuaded
her she should answer the questions.
For another half hour, Mr Garnham tried gamely to get
her to deliver her evidence in customary question-and-answer
form. When he came back after an adjournment, his tack
was to throw the floor open to her.
It would never be allowed in a criminal court, but here
it seemed the only way. Kouao filled the room with denials
and rebuttals, and almost screamed her innocence. With
the hand that wasn't chained to a prison guard she wagged
her finger at the lawyer and occasionally reinforced her
point with a clenched fist.
Three rows behind her, Mr and Mrs Climbie simply watched.
For them it merely underlined the unimaginable horror
their daughter was forced to suffer. Speaking alternately
in English at 300 words a minute or through a French interpreter,
Kouao claimed Victoria's parents didn't love her. Victoria
(or Anna, as she used to call her) had died not in her
hands but at the hands of doctors who treated the child
when she was finally taken into hospital.
Asked why the little girl had nothing in her stomach when
examined by doctors on the Friday she died, Kouao claimed
she had refused to eat. Matter-of-factly, she explained:
'All day Wednesday she didn't eat.
All day Thursday she didn't eat. Friday she died.' Her
voice rising to a shriek, she claimed doctors had given
Victoria the wrong medicine, that her tiny heart could
not cope - and that her injuries had occurred only when
she went to hospital.
She said Victoria was taken there because she was 'very
tired and had scratched herself' after catching scabies.
That was one reason there were marks on her. The picture
Mr Garnham painted was vastly different. The criminal
court and the inquiry have already been told that Victoria
was savagely beaten with a bicycle chain and a hammer.
Yesterday we heard how Victoria had been forced to stand
to attention when questioned by Kouao. Kouao denied ever
having injured Victoria or leaving her to freeze in a
bathroom, trussed up in a bin bag. 'I refuse to listen
to this,' she said. 'How can you put a human in a rubbish
bag? I was loving that little girl She was my daughter
in my heart.
'People are there to put everything on me to make me become
a monster. I am a very good mum ... I know how to care
for children. 'It is not because I took that little girl
that she is dead. The reason why she is dead is because
of the doctors. I came here to talk about the doctors
and the social workers, not about something else.'
Her evidence over, Kouao was led out in manacles. It had
taken nearly all day to hear her out, but nobody seemed
much the wiser. The Climbies' solicitor Imran Khan said
one needed to listen to Kouao for only a few minutes to
realise she was creating a 'tissue of lies' designed to
mislead. Nobody who did this could have been hoodwinked
by her, he added.
'She is taking the same line as the agencies. Everyone
blaming everybody else. No one accepting responsibility,'
he said. Previous inquiries into child abuse cases over
the last decade have concluded such deaths must never
be allowed to happen again. If that is to be the case
here, then there is clearly still a mountain to climb
at Hannibal House. |
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