THE PARENTS of Louise Jensen, the Danish tour guide brutally killed by three British soldiers in 1994, are furious that their daughter’s killers are being released one by one, with the last one likely to be freed tomorrow.
Allan Ford, 38, was quietly released on August 8, while Justin Fowler, also 38, is believed to have been released on Friday. The third man, Geoffrey Pernell, 36, is due out tomorrow, according to unconfirmed reports.
The authorities have tried to avoid publicising the release of the soldiers, which is being done separately to avoid media attention. It is believed they were each spirited back to the UK with the aid of the British High Commission.
The soldiers were initially jailed for life for murder, but in 1998 their sentence was reduced on appeal to manslaughter; with remissions and good behaviour, their sentences ended this year.
Jensen’s parents had made several appeals to the Cypriot authorities to reconsider their release, but officials rejected the appeals saying the soldiers’ release was rooted in a statute on remissions – applicable to every inmate – and they could not interfere with an independent judiciary.
In their first interview since the soldiers walked free, Poul and Annette Jensen told Britain’s Guardian newspaper they were disgusted to learn that the sentences had been reduced for good behaviour.
Speaking to the newspaper from the family home in the Danish seaside town of Hirtshals, Poul, 58, said: “It’s absurd that you can be released for good behaviour when the crime is so brutal. It is very offensive to the memory of Louise and to us as parents.”
“Those men had planned this crime. They kept an eye on Louise and her boyfriend at a gas station. They kidnapped my daughter, raped and murdered her. I can’t understand why they are released before their time is up, and I don’t think I’m supposed to understand it, because if I could understand it, I would not be a normal person.”
The three soldiers had been drinking when they abducted Louise Jensen, 23, from a motorbike she had been riding with her Cypriot boyfriend near Ayia Napa. She was beaten 15 times with an army spade and her body dumped in a shallow roadside grave, almost beyond recognition.
Poul Jensen also criticised President Tassos Papadopoulos for allowing the soldiers to go free. “I think it is very insulting that a country that has just been taken in by the EU has a law that favours the murderer and not the victim,” he said.
Louise’s mother said she hoped that at least Britons would reject the soldiers if they found them living among them. “I do not want them to have a good life in England but there is every chance that they will. They are still young men, young enough to get married and start a family.
Louise will never have that,” she said.
