YESTERDAY THE court finally heard him speak. For the past five weeks, Avinash Treebhoowoon has been a mute spectator at his own trial. His routine has never varied. Marched into court in handcuffs each morning, he has taken his place in the dock with his former colleague and co-accused Sandip Moneea.
There they have sat, occasionally gesturing to family members but barely acknowledging one another, as the prosecution has put more than 30 witnesses on the stand to slowly unfurl its case against the two hotel cleaners. They have sat impassively and silently through it all.
Treebhoowoon, the younger of the two defendants, is small and thin – his shirts always look a few sizes too big for his frame – and his slight physique seems exaggerated by the contrast with Moneea, a sturdier, stockier presence.
Treebhoowoon blends easily into the background – so much so that, even as the court has scrutinised his story so forensically, it has been easy to forget that the man himself is sitting in the corner, hanging on his interpreter’s every word.
He began to give evidence yesterday in a soft high-pitched voice, but he leaned in so close to the microphone in the witness box that his words boomed across the room.
The defendant seemed a little nervous at first, but he spoke for more than four hours about January 10th last year – the day Michaela McAreavey was killed – and the following day, when he was arrested. During a long stretch in the afternoon, he continued uninterrupted for 25 minutes, setting out his claims of police brutality without a single prompt from his barrister, Sanjeev Teeluckdharry.
The sentences just ran into one another; there was scarcely an “em” or an “ah”. A few feet away, Moneea did not take his eyes off his co-accused.
Speaking in Mauritian Creole, the island’s French-based lingua franca, Treebhoowoon told the court he approached room 1025 – the McAreaveys’ room – just before 2pm. There was a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. A man was just outside – he now knows it was John McAreavey – so he asked him if he could clean the room. The man knocked on the door, spoke to someone inside, then told him to come back in five minutes.
Treebhoowoon said he entered room 1025 at 2.10pm, cleaned it and left at 2.35pm. That is about 10 minutes before the time at which the prosecution says Michaela was killed. There was nobody inside the room when he was there, he told the court.
The first he heard that something was wrong was when he was talking to some colleagues and the hotel manager ran past them.
Something had happened in room 1025, he called out. They ran to the room, and when they reached it, Treebhoowoon saw a woman lying on her back on the floor, and the manager pressing down on her chest.
Treebhoowoon was arrested at Legends hotel the next day, and what he described was an almost continual series of threats and beatings from the moment he was put into a 4x4 van in the car park at the hotel.
At the local station, an officer slapped him twice. A senior detective hit him on the head with a plastic bottle. “‘Why are you beating me,’ I said. He replied: ‘I’m not beating you. You will know what a beating is. Talk’.”
He kept protesting his innocence, the witness said, but when he was transferred to Port Louis, the capital, the beatings got worse.
He was placed naked on a table and beaten on his heels with a cable. He was made to jump up and down so that his blood would not clot. He alleged that assistant police commissioner Yoosoof Soopun came in, sat on a table and placed his feet on Treebhoowoon’s chair.
“He showed me his gun, and told me, ‘If you don’t tell the truth, you will be killed today’.”
That night Treebhoowoon was brought to a police cell. He was crying, he told the court. “They said, ‘why are you crying?’ I told them that I was innocent. I was thinking about my family.”
The court was about to adjourn for the day. Treebhoowoon, beginning to sob, took a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his eyes.
