The husband of Winnie Brady, who disappeared last September while on a pilgrimage in Medjugorje, will be asked to identify her today from belongings found on a badly decomposed corpse in the hills above the Bosnian village.
Stephen Brady arrived in Medjugorje last night with his brother-in-law Phillip Shevlin, and will travel to the nearby town of Mostar this morning to see jewellery and a watch that he believes will confirm the death of his wife. "I have already been shown photos and I recognised our wedding ring, and a ring with 'Mum' on it that the children gave her last Christmas, and a watch. I recognised them immediately as hers," Mr Brady told The Irish Times last night.
Results of a postmortem are also expected today, but it is understood that local investigators do not suspect foul play in the death of Ms Brady (59), who disappeared last September from her guesthouse in Medjugorje.
A local man, Vidan Kozina, found the suspected corpse of Ms Brady last Sunday while he was hunting boar on the rarely visited slopes behind Apparition Hill, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to six children from the village in 1981.
While Bosnian police do not believe Ms Brady was coerced to climb the hill, they appear baffled as to how she crossed rough terrain to a remote location some 3km from the centre of Medjugorje. They are also puzzled as to how no one seems to have seen her walking through the village or climbing the hill in the middle of the day at a busy time of the year.
Ms Brady was last seen leaving her guesthouse at about midday on September 6th, after earlier declining to join the rest of her pilgrimage group at a prayer meeting because her arthritic knee was giving her pain.
She never returned, and a huge search, involving sniffer dogs, soldiers, hundreds of volunteers and a helicopter, yielded no clues as to her fate.
But Mr Kozina is certain it was her body he found on Sunday, and says police officers who examined the corpse at the scene noted that the jewellery and watch on the body appeared to match descriptions of items that Ms Brady was wearing when she vanished.
After a journey that began at his home in Kilbarrack, Dublin at 5.30am took him via London Gatwick airport to Dubrovnik on the Croatian coast, and ended with a three-hour drive from there to Medjugorje, Mr Brady expressed "relief" that today may finally bring "closure".
"We expect the results of the postmortem and will see if the dental records match. Then it is up to the coroner to decide whether she can come home," he said, adding that, if it is his wife in the morgue in Mostar, he wants to get her body back to Ireland as soon as possible. "I wanted her to come home sitting beside me," he said, "but after all we have been through, I would settle for that."
A number of pilgrims have disappeared in Medjugorje in recent years. None is believed to have been the victim of a crime, and several are thought to have got lost in rugged terrain.