Nurse ‘may have been raped’

Press, 20 November 1982, Page 8

Nurse ‘may have been raped’

NZPA Leeds A former policeman who claims that his daughter was murdered and did not fall accidentally from an apartment in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah heard at an inquest yesterday that she may have been gripped by the throat and forced to have sex before she died. Ronald Smith’s daughter Helen, who was working as a nurse in Saudi Arabia, was found dead in May 1979 outside the apartment of a British surgeon, Dr Richard Arnot, who had been holding an illegal drinking party. Saudi authorities concluded that Miss Smith, aged 23, and a Dutch seaman, Johannes Otten, whose body was found nearby, both fell accidentally from a sixthfloor balcony where the party was being held. But her father, from Guisely, Yorkshire, rejects the Saudi findings. After a three-year battle in the British courts, he won a fresh inquest to determine whether his claim that his daughter

had been brutally murdered was correct. A forensic scientist, Dr Michael Green, who carried out an autopsy on Miss Smith’s body in June 1980, told the inquest jury of seven men and four women at Leeds Coroner’s Court that some of her injuries were “not entirely consistent” with a fall. These included bruises to her face and sexual organs. Although Miss Smith’s principal injuries, including multiple fractures of the pelvis, were consistent with falling 10 metres or more, said Mr Green, the facial bruises “were more consistent with slaps from an open hand or punches with the fist” and were sustained “during life.” Injuries to Miss Smiths' thighs, and genitals, he said, were more consistent with “forceful sexual intercourse.” But he added: “It is not possible for me to say whether she fell or was G;hed or dropped from the cony.”