BRUTALLY SLAINTurkish teen boyfriend of Irish girl is chief suspect

TWO Irish women are believed to have been brutally slain by a 17-year-old in a Turkish forest because one of them would not let him marry her 15-year-old daughter.

Marion Graham and her friend Kathy Dinsmore, both 54, went missing on Thursday.

The bodies of the two women, both of whom had addresses in Newry and were travelling on Irish passports, were discovered in woods just outside Izmir yesterday. They had been repeatedly stabbed.

Shannon Graham’s 17-year-old boyfriend Recep Celik was arrested and, after initially denying the killing, is understood to have confessed.

It is believed Shannon had been on a boat trip, while her boyfriend took the two women on a shopping trip.

He hired a taxi which took them from Kusadasi — the resort where Marion Graham lived for long periods of the year and where Celik worked as a waiter — to Izmir.

There, he allegedly collected his father’s taxi and took them to the forest and attacked them with a knife.

The two women suffered multiple stab wounds, including having their throats cut.

The alarm was raised on Thursday night when the waiter, said to have been in a distressed state, arrived for work in a Kusadasi restaurant.

He claimed he had suffered a cut to his hand trying to fight off kidnappers who had bundled the two women into a van.

According to Turkish state news agency Anatolia, police also detained the teenager’s father and the taxi driver from Kusadasi.

Various motives were being cited for the murders in the Turkish media. Initially, it was suggested that the two women had objected to the way Shannon was treated by her boyfriend.

Then, it became more widely speculated it was because Marion Graham had denied the couple permission to marry. It is believed Celik had an argument with Marion Graham a week before the killings.

Yesterday, Shannon was being comforted throughout the day by a Kusadasi-based Irish hotelier at a police station in Izmir, while an Irish Embassy official was also dispatched from Ankara to support the teenager.

A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs here confirmed that consular staff are trying to track down family members.

“We are providing consular assistance through the embassy in Ankara,” the spokesman said.

Raymond McGuinness, the girl’s father and Ms Graham’s ex-partner, is flying to Turkey today to bring his daughter home, along with her mother’s body and that of her friend.

The two victims had been regular visitors to Kusadasi, staying in an apartment owned by Mr McGuinness.

It is a popular holiday resort, especially for visitors from western Europe, and more notably Britain and Ireland.