Tobago attack survivor says murders of foreigners may be linked

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/23/tobago-attack-survivor-murders-foreigners-link

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A British man who narrowly escaped death at the hands of a machete-wielding attacker on Tobago has said he believes the murders of a British couple on the island this week and a series of other similar unsolved killings of foreigners living there may be linked.

Richard Wheeler, 73, and his wife, Grace, 67, who were originally from Sheffield, were found dead at their Tobago home on Tuesday. The murders brought back horrific memories for Peter Green, 71, and his wife, who returned to the UK after he was attacked on the patio of their villa in Tobago in 2009.

“We have no doubt that these killings are the work of a serial killer or killers, that they are linked,” Green told the Guardian from his home in Somerset. He said he had been friends with some of the other victims and that Richard Wheeler, a lawyer, had acted for him in property matters.

Last year Hubertus and Birgid Keil, a German couple in their 70s, were found hacked to death on a beach near their vacation home on Tobago’s southern coast. The attack happened a short distance away from the Greens’ villa, which is a few doors away from where a German engineer was murdered in 2009.

Seven miles away, in 2008 a Swedish couple, Anna Sundsval and Ake Olson, were killed in their villa. Green said: “I honestly believe there is a link. If you look at what happened to the Olsons, the Kiels and now with the Wheelers, they have all been killed with a cutlass-type weapon, which is what was used on me.”

Little or nothing had been stolen in the home invasions, he said, apart from in his own case some belongings which appear to have been taken opportunistically.

Echoing suspicions privately voiced by some other foreigners who have lived in Tobago, Green went as far to suggest that the attacks could be linked to local resentment towards foreigners owning property on the island.

Recounting one of his last conversations last year with Richard Wheeler, whom he had asked to act in the disposal of land, Green said: “He got back to me and told me that the deeds had been tampered with and my wife’s name has been taken off them. I asked: ‘Why would they want to do that?’ He said: ‘I really don’t know but the only thing I can come up with is that they thought that you were going to die, Peter.’

“He felt the name had been taken off and nobody had noticed it, and that if I died it would make it easier to obtain that land.”

The Trinidad and Tobago high commission provided no response when approached for an interview about the security situation on the island and matters relating to the murders.

On Friday local press reports said detectives had detained two men and a woman in their 20s as part of an investigation into the Wheelers’ killings.

Asked at a press conference about the possibility of a serial killer, a police spokesman said: “We have not yet completed this investigation, so it’s exceedingly difficult to say whether or not they are serial killers, but the investigation is ongoing and if such information has come to hand we will make it public.”

This week the Foreign Office updated its travel advice for the approximately 30,000 Britons a year who visit Trinidad and Tobago. “Most visits to Tobago are trouble free, but tourists (including British nationals) have been robbed,” it says. “The inability of the authorities to catch and prosecute offenders remains a concern.”