Fear keeps family from memorial service

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Friends and colleagues of a New Zealand building supervisor slain in the Solomon Islands will hold a memorial service for him today, but security fears are keeping family members away.

Fletcher Construction was already planning the service for former Aucklander Kevin O'Brien before a second New Zealander, Deputy High Commissioner Bridget Nichols, was stabbed to death in Honiara a week ago.

Her funeral will be held in Wellington tomorrow.

Mr O'Brien was stabbed with a wartime bayonet on February 9, allegedly by a local employee whom he had accused of shoddy work for Fletcher on a new Finance Ministry building.

The firm's manager in the Solomons, former Southlander John Mulholland, said the memorial service would be held at the Honiara yacht club where Mr O'Brien had set up a sailing school for young Solomon Islanders. He had married a local woman and they had a 2-year-old child.

But one of Mr O'Brien's three Picton-based sisters, Caroline Burn, told the Herald yesterday that the murder of Ms Nichols had put the family off attending the service.

Mrs Burn said the family appreciated Fletcher's gesture in arranging it, but his funeral had already been held in Picton and their presence in Honiara today might only inflame tensions among the Malaitan community believed to be harbouring his killer.

His widow, Annette, and daughter, Lara, will attend the service but Mrs Burn said they were making arrangements to leave the Solomon Islands for either New Zealand or Australia as soon as they could because of the continuing ethnic violence there.

This included their discovery on returning from her brother's funeral that their landlord had been abducted at gunpoint from the house next to theirs, and released only after paying a ransom.

Annette O'Brien, who was from the Solomons' Western Province, was also concerned about retribution against her people after two Malaitan "special constables" were slain there three weeks ago.

Mrs Burn welcomed the efforts of New Zealand police in trying to find the killer of Ms Nichols, who was stabbed outside her Honiara home eight days ago, but criticised a reluctance by their Solomon Islands counterparts to arrest her brother's murderer.

"People we have talked to said they could have caught him on the day he did it, but the police are ineffectual and many of them are Malaitans."

The family were told by the New Zealand High Commission a week ago that the Solomon Islands police were preparing to travel to the island of Malaita, east of Honiara, to arrest the suspect, but Mrs Burn said she had received no update.

"One of their [the High Commission's] staff has been killed so the last thing we want to do is to put pressure on them."

Up to 800 people, including Foreign Minister Phil Goff, are expected at Ms Nichols' funeral in St Paul's Cathedral in Molesworth St.

Prime Minister Helen Clark indicated she would have attended had she not been flying to the US tonight to meet President George W. Bush and his top officials.