A Melbourne man set free after being charged with murdering his wife says the last time he saw her alive, she had just told him she had another husband.
Simon Macartney walked free from a court in Fiji on Monday after authorities dropped the murder charge against him
for lack of evidence.
Macartney, 34, was charged with murder last Friday, the day the body of his wife Ashika Lata Macartney, 29, was found under bushes at Deuba, on Fiji's main island of Viti Levu.
Police believe the Fiji-born woman was strangled not long after she flew in to Fiji from Melbourne on October 22 to be met at Nadi Airport by Macartney. He told police he dropped her off at the town of Sigatoka, about 70km from Nadi, and believed she was murdered by the person she met there.
Macartney said that just before he dropped her off, she told him she had another husband.
"She told me she was meeting her new husband in Sigatoka. Her parents had arranged another husband for her and she had only just told me five minutes before I dropped her off," Macartney said.
"Naturally I was stunned. I thought well, were you married before me or have you been married since you married me? I am still at a loss as to who this guy is."
Macartney, from Rockbank in Melbourne, was charged with murder after his wife's partly decomposed body was found last Friday at Deuba, close to the capital Suva on the main road from Sigatoka.
Prosecutors dropped the charge when Macartney appeared in Suva Magistrates Court yesterday.
Magistrate John Semisi said he was "baffled" that police had charged the suspect despite investigations being incomplete, the Fiji Times newspaper reported.
A senior police prosecutor said Macartney could be charged again if evidence emerged, although another senior police officer said this was unlikely, the Fiji Times reported.
- AAP
