Cascade of numbers frustrates eyewitness and judge as lawyer for accused asked to change tack

IT WAS starting to sound less like a cross-examination and more like a maths test when Raj Theekoy finally, after a day and a half on the stand, betrayed a hint of annoyance. “I’m not good at mathematics. How can I calculate it?” he protested.

His questioner was Sanjeev Teeluckdharry, representing one of the accused men, Avinash Treebhoowoon. He was reading through the list of rooms Theekoy had cleaned at Legends Hotel on January 10th last year, the day Michaela McAreavey was killed, stopping each time to ask the witness what time he entered, how long he spent there, and what time he left. For each room, the lawyer compared Theekoy’s recollections with data from his staff keycard – invariably, the times didn’t match.

The numbers – rooms, minutes, metres – cascaded in rapid, almost indistinguishable sequences. When Theekoy got a sum wrong, Teeluckdharry berated him.

“Objection!” prosecution lawyer Mehdi Manrakhan rose to his feet and reminded the court that Theekoy never went to secondary school. “He is trying to confuse the witness.”

Judge Prithviraj Fecknah had had enough. “There is no reason to get into arguments with the witness over mathematics,” he growled at the defence lawyer. He should bear in mind the witness’s “mental capacities when it comes to mathematics”.

“You are exasperating everybody, going round and round like this . . . Don’t take us to be more stupid than we are.”

Teeluckdharry was “much obliged” for the steer.

On his second day on the stand, Theekoy – the hotel cleaner who has implicated the two defendants in the killing – gave another composed, fluent, if slightly nervous performance. Dressed in an orange shirt and cream trousers, he stood just feet from his two former colleagues and can’t have missed the scowling faces of their relatives as he squeezed past them on his way to the witness box.

Theekoy was the first witness to address the court entirely in Mauritian Creole, the island’s French-based lingua franca. Brendan and Claire McAreavey, John’s father and sister, wedged between two PSNI officers and an Irish diplomat, watched the cross-examination without interpreters.

But the language shift must have come as a relief to most of the Mauritians in the room – not least the younger of the two accused men, Treebhoowoon, who normally needs an interpreter to understand what is being said in court. He seemed more engaged and animated than usual yesterday.

It also put right one of the stranger aspects of the trial – that proceedings are taking place mainly in a language (English) that most witnesses and lawyers plainly do not fully master.

Not that Theekoy had everything his way. Having previously said he went straight home after finishing his cleaning rounds on January 10th, he was yesterday confronted with CCTV images that showed him walking into the staff canteen at 3.46pm. That revelation brought guffaws from some of the defendants’ family members.

Defence counsel Rama Valayden put it to Theekoy that he had sat down with Treebhoowoon and another cleaner in the canteen that afternoon, and that they joked together. He drank tea from a white cup, the lawyer said. To which Theekoy replied: “I don’t drink tea.”

The defence also wanted to know why he didn’t tell police that he had been forced to leave a previous job, at the Marina Hotel, after a bottle of wine was found in his bag.

Theekoy maintained his innocence but had no way of proving the bottle was his, so management told him to resign.

Having spent two weeks hearing slow-motion evidence from witnesses with limited involvement in the story, the trial has shifted up a gear in recent days.

Theekoy, granted immunity by the state on condition that he appeared as the prosecution’s “star witness”, has now been and gone in less time than some police technicians spent on the stand. The court zipped through two further witnesses in the afternoon before being informed that the prosecution had run out of names for the day. That was a first.

But before the adjournment, Manrakhan confirmed the day’s rumour: John McAreavey will finally take the stand today. The day has been cleared for his appearance, and court officials can confidently expect some of the biggest crowds the old courthouse has ever seen.