A BOLLYWOOD director is planning to make a film about the rape and murder of Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old British girl whose bruised, half-naked body was found on a beach in Goa in February.
Prabhakar Shukla is believed to be planning to start filming Rave Party in the state of Goa, in south-west India, in July and has already approached Katrina Kaif, a Bollywood actress who was brought up in London, to play Scarlett.
Shukla said the
case had inspired him to expose the seedier side of Goa, a former Portuguese colony renowned around the world as a "hippy paradise" but which has also become a haven for drug dealers and addicts.
He said: "The whole film is against drug abuse and the exploitation of tourists. Not just in India, but all around the world, real-life cinema is attracting curiosity."
His last production, Kahani Gudiya Ki (Story Of A Little Doll) was released last year and was based on the true story of an Indian prisoner of war in Pakistan.
He had not yet contacted Fiona MacKeown, Scarlett's mother, he said, but hoped to meet her on a planned trip to Britain next month. "I have great sympathy for her," he added.
MacKeown said she had reservations about the proposed film, which she feared would portray Scarlett in a bad light, rather than her killers and the police who tried to cover their tracks.
She said: "I'd like to know how they're going to portray it, or I won't approve it. I'm not sure about calling it Rave Party. Scarlett was not at a party. She was raped and murdered on the beach."
Scarlett's case was the most brutal of a series of recent sexual assaults on foreign women – several of them British – that have raised concerns about the safety of female tourists in India over the past six months.
A 32-year-old Indian man was given a life sentence on Wednesday for raping a 40-year-old British freelance journalist while she was staying in his guesthouse in the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan in December. Police in Goa originally claimed that Scarlett had drowned accidentally, but a second post-mortem examination demanded by her mother revealed that she had been raped and murdered.
A barman and an alleged drugs dealer have since been remanded in custody on suspicion of plying Scarlett with drugs and then raping her and murdering her by a beach bar in the early hours of February 18.
MacKeown flew back to Britain with Scarlett's body last month, but returned to India a week ago to investigate why Indian pathologists had removed some of her daughter's organs without her permission.
She said: "How could they send an empty body back with me? What if it was one of their children?"
She still believed that powerful local drug dealers were involved in Scarlett's murder, as well as the two men in custody, she said, and that they had paid off the local police to try and cover up the crime.
The Central Bureau of Investigation, India's equivalent of the FBI, which the local authorities have now asked to handle the case, has yet to launch its inquiry, MacKeown said.
The British High Commission has recommended that she should wait to see what priority the CBI gives to Scarlett's case before demanding that the Indian Government should invite Scotland Yard to help with the investigation, she said.
"Someone's dragging their feet," MacKeown said. "I just don't know who."
The full article contains 592 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
