Goa Man Who Raped, Murdered Irish Tourist In 2017 Jailed For Life

A sessions court in Goa sentenced a local man identified as Vikat Bhagat to life imprisonment on February 17, nearly eight years after he raped and murdered a 28-year-old Irish-British tourist. Danielle McLaughlin was found dead in a field in Canacona in March 2017. On February 14, Additional Sessions Judge Kshama Joshi found Bhagat guilty of the horrific crime. He was convicted under IPC sections 302 (murder), 376 (rape) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence or giving false information to screen offender).

The Case In Detail

Danielle McLaughlin was a backpacker from Donegal and had come to India on a holiday with her friend in February 2017.  A former student of Liverpool John Moores University, she was from Buncrana in County Donegal in Ireland and had travelled to India on a British passport. 

On March 14, 2017, McLaughlin's lifeless body was found in a pool of blood without clothes and with injuries on her head and face in a field near Palolem beach in Canacona, South Goa. The post-mortem revealed that she died due to brain haemorrhage and constriction of the neck.

Goa Police arrested her local friend Vikat Bhagat for the crime. According to the probe, the accused took her in an isolated field, sexually assaulted her, hit her with a glass bottle on her head and face, and strangled her on the intervening night between March 13 and March 14, 2017.

Seasoned lawyer Vikas Varma, representing the victim's family, said, "Bhagat disfigured her. When I looked at Danielle's images after she had been attacked, it just made us even more determined to secure justice for her family... To my understanding, they are relieved that there is a closure.”

Following Bhagat’s conviction, McLaughlin's family told The Irish Sun, “There was no other suspect or gang involved in Danielle’s death and Vikat Bhagat was solely responsible for cruelly ending her beautiful life... The quest for justice has been no easy matter, as we have discovered."

Lawyer Vikas Varma was also involved in the case against a man accused of the murder of British minor Scarlett Keeling in February 2008. A local man, bartender Samson D’Souza was found guilty in 2019 of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” after another long trial in Goa.

Dave Woodruff told The Guardian about McLaughlin, the friendly 28-year-old woman from Ireland, who he met at the Green Park beach resort on Palolem beach. Woodruff recalled how he and his two friends were talking to McLaughlin on the beach the night before she was killed when a group of about five men came and sat down near them.

“We chatted a lot, and these guys would pull her back and say: ‘You’re with us, remember,'" he told The Guardian. “She was just like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’,” he said. 

McLaughlin told him she had met one of them the year before. “The man was going to help her find a place to stay,” he said. He believes that man was Bhagat.

McLaughlin’s family spoke out after the verdict was handed down.

"We have lost nearly eight years of our lives fighting for Danielle," McLaughlin's sister, Joleen McLaughlin Brannigan, said, the BBC reports.

"We are so thankful that we can now start grieving her immeasurable loss. She made the most of her 28 years, and lived every day to the fullest."