The parents of Franco-Irish teenager Nóra Quoirin, who disappeared from a holiday chalet in Malaysia in August 2019, and whose body was found in the jungle ten days later, say they are outraged by Malaysia’s refusal to share details of its investigations with the French judiciary.

“In 2019, in addition to the involvement of police from Ireland, the UK and France, the French judiciary opened an inquiry to investigate Nóra’s possible kidnapping,” Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin explained.

This was after the Quoirins had filed a complaint in a Paris court against persons unknown.

“This week, meeting with the appointed judge in the Courts of Justice, Paris, we learned that Malaysia is still refusing to share any aspects of their inquiry under the pretext that the inquiry remains open,” Nóra’s parents said.

“The attorney-general in Malaysia has determined that the execution of the request at this juncture would prejudice the criminal matter in Malaysia.”

Nóra’s parents said they were “deeply outraged” by Malaysia’s stance and remained determined to fight to discover the truth about what happened to her.

Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin remain convinced that Nóra was abducted.

“Once again, we are faced with a refusal to search for and deliver the truth. Preferring silence and obscuring of international justice over the defence of an innocent child. Nonetheless, we will continue to fight for answers,” they said.

“France won’t do anything else now after six years of non-cooperation unless a new element comes to light.

“If a new element does come to light, France will absolutely act again. They aren’t shutting anything down; it’s just that they can’t take their inquiry any further at this stage.”

Nóra’s parents explained that, over the past six years, France has led what is known as a mirror inquiry – “not least as Nóra was a French citizen”.

This, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin said, involved serious effort, “notably considering all aspects of Nóra’s environment and interviewing friends, neighbours and teachers to establish as much factual background as possible”.

Throughout its inquiry, France has sought mutual legal assistance and judicial cooperation from Malaysia and, at each stage, has been refused, they added.

Nóra was just 15 when she disappeared on the night of August 3/4, 2019. Her naked body was found next to a stream about two kilometres from the Dusun resort in the state of Negeri Sembilan ten days later.

In June 2021, a high court judge in Malaysia overturned the decision made by the coroner in the inquest into Nóra’s death and declared an open verdict. This is the verdict that was requested by Nóra’s parents.

Justice Azizul Azmi Adnan, sitting in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, said it was not probable that Nóra left the chalet by herself, navigated challenging terrain, and evaded detection for six days during an extensive search and rescue operation.

He said he had every confidence that the coroner sought to take care in undertaking her inquiry, but she was in error, he said, to record a verdict of misadventure.

The judge said that the balance and coordination issues Nóra faced, together with the fact that she tired easily established, in his view, that it would have been unlikely that her death was the result of misadventure.

He said: “I am of the view that the verdict of misadventure ought to be vacated in the interests of justice and substituted with an open verdict as there was no credible evidence to support any other verdict.”

Justice Adnan gave his verdict after Nóra’s parents applied for a revision of the coroner’s decision.

The coroner, Maimoonah Aid, had ruled on January 4 that no third party was involved in Nóra’s death. She said it was “more probable than not” that Nóra died by misadventure.

Justice Adnan said Nóra would either have to have clambered over broken fencing or squeezed between gaps in a gate. This would not have been impossible, he said, but it would have been very difficult for someone with Nóra’s physical difficulties.

It was also likely to have been dark, the judge said, which would have made the track doubly challenging.

Once out of the resort, Nóra would then have to have crossed rocky stream beds and go up and down steep slopes, the judge said. It would have been extremely unlikely, he said, for Nóra to have been able to navigate such terrain barefoot.

He also said that Nóra was a shy and retiring child who was uncurious and unadventurous and who was strongly attached emotionally to her parents.

The Quoirins say evidence supports the theory that Nóra’s body was placed at the spot where a group of hikers who had volunteered to join the search found it.

Sebastien Quoirin told the inquest into Nóra’s death that she lacked the stamina and skills to survive alone in the jungle for seven days.

He also said that, when he identified Nóra’s body, he saw that her feet were dirty, but not particularly damaged. This, he said, was not compatible with someone walking barefoot through the jungle for seven days, which is what the police suggested had happened.

Maebh Quoirin spoke about the nature of the terrain around the Dusun resort. “It was extremely steep, extremely rocky, extremely difficult to navigate across branches, across dense jungle,” she said.

Nóra’s parents say that crucial time and evidence was lost because the Malaysian police insisted on treating the teenager’s disappearance as a case of a missing person, not a crime. It was not until three days after Nóra went missing that police took some fingerprints from the chalet, they said.

After a ten-hour postmortem on Nóra’s body, Malaysian police said there was no evidence of foul play. They said the cause of death was upper gastrointestinal bleeding due to a duodenal ulcer complicated with perforation and the bleeding was most likely caused by prolonged hunger and stress.

The Malaysian pathologists put the date of Nóra’s death at two or three days, and no more than four days, before her body was found.

Nóra had learning and physical disabilities and attended a school for children with special needs. She was born with holoprosencephaly, a rare congenital condition in which there is incomplete separation of the right and left hemispheres or the brain is smaller than normal, which is what happened with Nóra.

Her parents say she would never have wandered out of the Dusun chalet by herself.

The Quoirins said they wished to sincerely thank their lawyer in France, Maître Charles Morel, as well as the French justice system for all its endeavours and its ongoing support of their family.

DONATE TO CHANGING TIMES VIA SIMPLE PAYMENTS

1= 5 euro, x 2 = 10 euro, X 3 =15 euro, etc.

€5.00