Village mourns loss of mother and daughter

Devastated parents and a distraught young father were foremost among the mourners who wept and watched as a mother and her daughter, murdered in Co Kerry, were laid to rest in a hillside grave outside the tiny Lithuanian village of Gedrimai yesterday.

As the bodies of 27-year-old Jolanta Lubiene and her eight-year-old girl, Enrika, were lowered into a double grave near the village where Jolanta grew up, the dead woman’s mother threw a handful of soil from the gravedigger’s spade onto the two white coffins. Ramute Santiene then cast a single white rose into the open grave.

Enrika’s father Marius Lubys, 29, heartbroken at losing his little girl, came next, throwing a soft toy into the void and another long-stemmed rose.