The mother of Nora Quoirin, a French-Irish teenager whose body was found near a Malaysian jungle resort, has welcomed the decision by a Malaysian court to overturn an inquest verdict of "misadventure" in her death.
Meabh Quoirin said it was the "only reasonable" outcome after it was changed to an open verdict today.
The 15-year-old was discovered dead nine days after she went missing from an eco-resort in the south-east Asian state in August 2019. Her family maintain the evidence shows she was abducted.
Speaking following the court's decision, Ms Quoirin said the family were relieved by the outcome.
"It's a very big day for us, we're very emotional," she told the BBC.
"But we're very pleased with the outcome. Nora was always going to be worth fighting for and this is the verdict we wanted.
"It was really the only reasonable verdict open to us in the sense that the proof that we had could only really lead to this road as a credible one as far as we were concerned."
A Malaysian High Court found today that a coroner erred in ruling that the death of Nora Anne Quoirin was likely to have been due to a misadventure that did not involve other people.
High Court judge Azizul Azmi Adnan agreed with Nora’s parents that it would not have been probable for the 15-year-old to venture out on her own, navigate the steep terrain and evade detection for days, due to her mental and physical disabilities.
He ruled that “the verdict of misadventure ought to be vacated in the interest of justice and substituted with an open verdict”, a finding by a coroner of death without stating the cause.
The ruling is a legal victory for Nora’s parents, who believe it was likely she was kidnapped and had appealed the coroner’s verdict, issued in January.
The teenager disappeared at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on August 4 2019, a day after the family arrived for a holiday.
After a major search, her body was found on August 13 beside a stream on a palm oil estate about 1.6 miles (2.5km) from the resort.
The coroner had ruled out homicide, natural death and suicide and said it was likely that she got lost after leaving her family’s cottage on her own, and that no-one else was involved.
Police have said there was no evidence of foul play, but her parents said she would not have wandered off on her own.
They told the inquest that a third party could have dumped her body in the area following the search for her.
The coroner had described the family’s suggestions as “nothing more than probably theory” with no evidence.
