Mother sues Thomas Cook after daughter's "abduction" at Turkish resort

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/mother-suing-holiday-firm-over-%E2%80%98abduction%E2%80%99/ar-AAzeerK?li=BBoPRmx

A strange sounding story.

Mother sues Thomas Cook over her child's 'abduction' at Turkish resort
Janet Alexander says her daughter was taken from a hotel kids' club and that the travel company failed to help her.


13:17, UK,Wednesday 27 June 2018


A mother says she is suing Thomas Cook because her daughter was abducted during a holiday at a resort in Turkey.

Janet Alexander, from Inverness, took her daughters Lois and Rose to Royal Wings Hotel, Antalya, in April for their first trip abroad.

On the third day of their week-long holiday, she left five-year-old Rose at a supervised kids' club in the hotel while she took Lois, nine, to a scuba diving lesson.
But when she returned for Rose around an hour later the little girl had disappeared.
After a "frantic" search, Rose was spotted by another hotel guest walking near the main road with a woman.
Rose said she had thought the woman was a staff member, as the woman had been inside the play area.


Image: Lois and Rose Alexander were on their first trip abroad. Pic: Digby Brown Solicitors
When the woman invited Rose to "go for a walk", she had thought it was okay as she had gone for outside walks at primary school.
Ms Alexander, 46, said she failed to get any answers from a Thomas Cook representative at the hotel, so she took her children to the police.
Police told Ms Alexander that, as Rose was not physically harmed and had been found safely, they could not investigate the matter any further.
Ms Alexander, a senior charge nurse at NHS Highland, said the experience had been "the most traumatic of my life".
She added: "I thought my daughter was either dead or faced being trafficked and abused.

"No matter how much I process things it just leaves me in pieces. I've been shaking and in tears ever since it happened - I even struggle to leave the kids at school now.


Image: Janet Alexander, pictured with Rose, says she was traumatised by the experience. Pic: Digby Brown Solicitors
"My work, neighbours, family and friends have all been really supportive."
She said that, while the Turkish police had been "kind and sympathetic", Thomas Cook had been "a disgrace", going to "great lengths to ignore me".
"What happened has changed our whole way of living and without even apology it's like I can't get closure and don't know how to heal," she said
Simon Richards, associate at Digby Brown Solicitors, is pursuing Ms Alexander's civil claim and agreed the family had been "traumatised".
"Thankfully Rose was safely reunited with her family but her abduction had a very serious and lasting detrimental impact," he said.
"The Royal Wings Hotel breached its contractual duties by failing to look after children in its play area but Thomas Cook are ultimately responsible as it is the company who sold the holiday."
A Thomas Cook spokesman said: "We were very concerned to hear of this incident and we understand how distressing it must have been.

"We are investigating thoroughly with the hotel to understand what happened and we will work with the hotel to make any required changes so that this can't happen again."
The hotel said its children's club was safe and secure.


https://news.sky.com/story/mother-sues-thomas-cook-over-her-childs-abduction-at-turkish-resort-11418495

Ms Alexander, a senior charge nurse at NHS Highland, said the experience had been "the most traumatic of my life".
She added: "I thought my daughter was either dead or faced being trafficked and abused.

Why would she think that? The child could have wandered off out of the kids' club. Mine both wandered off out of a kids' club at a resort in Egypt while myself and my partner were scuba-diving. They came and went from the club as they pleased apparently - I know because they told me afterwards (or at least the four-year-old did. The two-year-old was just following suit).

I blamed myself for having left them in a haphazardly-run kids' club. Afterwards, I couldn't believe I felt it was okay to leave them but I was young and just thought things would be okay. Things were okay - my four year old just said they wanted to wander around the resort and find some friends they had made.

Even if I had returned to find them missing, I would not  had thought they were dead or trafficked. What a ridiculous over-reaction

Who was the woman who took her in any case? How do we know her intention was 'abduction'?

Stories like this irritate me.

Perhaps completely coincidentally,  at Ocean Club Luz there were also Thomas Cook guests there during the week that Madeleine was allegedly 'abducted'.

I think that children of Thomas Cook guests were also able to use the kids' club and creche as well as Mark Warner child guests - and indeed any children were allowed to use the OC kids' clubs I do believe - for a price of 12 Euros per session I think it was.

I wonder how many of the kids using the kids' club and creche at Ocean Club during the week that Madeleine went missing were not Mark Warner guests but perhaps Thomas Cook guests or even guests not staying in the resort?

It's on the Daily Mail website now: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5891455/Mother-sues-holiday-giant-Thomas-Cook-daughter-five-abducted.html

The girl was abducted by a stranger in a hijab according to them

This kind of news story usually appears as a distraction from McCann happenings behind the scenes.

Not a mention of them in the story which is rather surprising.

If she cared that much for her daughters' welfare she wouldn't have taken them to Turkey in the first place. In my opinion, obviously.

Very bizarre the lack of reference to the McCanns but I'm sure that this will follow in other papers.

Something was niggling me about this but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, I realised what it was this morning:

The girl is five years old and at primary school so, even if her mother has a lax attitude to child safety, she will have been taught about "stranger danger". She will have been warned when the school day is over not to leave alone or with someone other than the person designated to collect her - even if she knows them.

The comment about her going for walks at school so she didn't think she was doing anything wrong, along with the other guest's comment that they thought that the woman was hotel employee, it's likely that the "hijab wearing abductor" works at the kids club and had to fetch something so asked the little girl if she wanted to walk with her.

As with all of these attempted abduction stories, we only hear one side of the story and that side is full of holes and wanting money.

The fact that there are ambulance chasing lawyers involved should be the biggest red flag. It reminded me a lot of this story, which also seems a bit.... unlikely to have happened as reported?

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/girl-aged-4-suffers-devastating-7565652

I'm being reminded of this absolute steaming heap of ****

https://maddiemccannmystery.forumotion.co.uk/t1813-debunked-cyprus-snatch-story-read-first-hand-testimony-of-what-really-happpened-here

Poe wrote:Something was niggling me about this but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, I realised what it was this morning:

The girl is five years old and at primary school so, even if her mother has a lax attitude to child safety,  she will have been taught about "stranger danger".  She will have been warned when the school day is over not to leave alone or with someone other than the person designated to collect her - even if she knows them.

The comment about her going for walks at school so she didn't think she was doing anything wrong, along with the other guest's comment that they thought that the woman was hotel employee, it's likely that the "hijab wearing abductor" works at the kids club and had to fetch something so asked the little girl if she wanted to walk with her.

As with all of these attempted abduction stories, we only hear one side of the story and that side is full of holes and wanting money.

I agree. I think the story sounds bogus. Would be interesting to get an account from the five year old and also from the so-called 'abductor'. I presume they both would have been interviewed, if only by hotel staff/Thomas Cook representatives. There are, after all, two sides to every story. Unless you are the McCanns that is! Funny that.

If you read the BBC version of the story it's clarified that she was still on the hotel property when she was found:

Ms Alexander said Rose was later found with a woman, walking near a main road within the hotel's grounds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-44625857

So:
1. The mother left the child at the play area and came back an hour later to find her missing
2. Everyone searched for the child
3. The child was found 20 minutes later, still on the hotel grounds, in the company of an unidentified woman

If this was a genuine abduction or if the "abductor" had planned to make off with this child, I think it highly unlikely that she'd have stayed on the hotel property. I suspect she'd have made a quick getaway and would have been long gone from the area.

Just my thoughts.

Why was the woman not detained and allowed to leave the scene if she had taken a child without permission? Did nobody speak to her to ask what she was doing?

I'm wondering if what actually happened is that the child decided to leave the area of her own accord and perhaps followed the woman and was having an adventure on her own, with the woman perhaps unaware that she was being followed. We only have the child's version of events to go on. It's not good that nobody noticed the child missing - that's a flaw at the "supervised" play area. But when you look at the details, you might wonder whether, out of fear, the child may not be telling all of the facts, or the entire truth. Sorry to be so sceptical of this story but things just don't add up in my mind.

canada12 wrote:If you read the BBC version of the story it's clarified that she was still on the hotel property when she was found:

Ms Alexander said Rose was later found with a woman, walking near a main road within the hotel's grounds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-44625857

So:
1. The mother left the child at the play area and came back an hour later to find her missing
2. Everyone searched for the child
3. The child was found 20 minutes later, still on the hotel grounds, in the company of an unidentified woman

If this was a genuine abduction or if the "abductor" had planned to make off with this child, I think it highly unlikely that she'd have stayed on the hotel property. I suspect she'd have made a quick getaway and would have been long gone from the area.

Just my thoughts.

Agreed. It doesn't sound remotely like an 'abduction' to me.  Scaremongering and ambulance chasing more like.

IMO

A holiday-maker has defended the hotel and the kids' club in a recent review, saying it is safe. How can it be right that the press are allowed to report negatively when there is no proof of what really happened?  Were any arrests made? Was any police report made? Was the child distressed by the incident?

The more I think about it, the more I find the behaviour of the McCanns and their friends abhorrent. Belittling the Portuguese police; shouting at a neighbour who offered to help by calling police, promoting Madeleine's 'coloboma' when they then said she didn't have one, allowing the twins to remain in the public eye.  I could go on but what is so astonishing is why they have got away with it all for so long?

https://www.thomascook.com/destinations/turkey/antalya/lara-beach/royal-wings-hotel/

Fancy that. They're in a muslim country and it's a woman in a 'hijab' that finds the child who wandered off. She may have just been being kind and trying to get the kid back to were she had wandered from.

Xenophobia keeps the trafficking myth alive it would seem.

We need to know why the woman was simply allowed to leave.

Surely Rose's mother was told why.

Gloria-Trubshawe wrote:Fancy that. They're in a muslim country and it's a woman in a 'hijab' that finds the child who wandered off. She may have just been being kind and trying to get the kid back to were she had wandered from.

   Xenophobia keeps the trafficking myth alive it would seem.

Agreed. The whole 'child abduction' thing is exaggerated by the media - and if swarthy 'foreigners' can be introduced into the narrative, then so much the better. I think it's designed to play on people's deepest fears. As Kate writes in her book in the vast majority of cases where children are harmed by people it is the parents, family members or people known (and often trusted) by the children who cause the harm.

But the fact is that abuse knows no social or economic boundaries. The Ramsay Bennett case, imo, is an example of this. And of course money can buy you expensive lawyers and 'reputation managers' - which means that abuse cases will be over-represented by families on low incomes because they do not have the resources to pay for people to lie for them represent them.

There are some desperately sad web-sites that list the children who have been harmed by their parents, step-parents or other family members. The stories are so similar. There is nearly always a history of neglect and abuse and this escalates up to the point where the child is sometimes tragically killed. In so many cases the family is known to child welfare agencies and/or a concerned childcare worker/neighbour/teacher has raised the alarm. But the abusers are very devious and manage to hide the abuse from the relevant authorities. I suppose that when the abusers realize they can get away with it they escalate the attacks.

I think that the problem is it is very difficult to get inside the mindset of someone who could behave like this if you are on the 'normal' scale. You just can't believe anyone could be so duplicitous and downright horrible. And manipulative.

Of course there are the (very rare) cases when a child is abducted and abused by a complete stranger, but these are very rare. And again, there will often be a history of criminal behaviour by the abductor who has managed to evade the authorities until he (occasionally she) gets too complacent and eventually gets caught.

But, as Kate writes in her book, abduction by strangers is very rare and is not the typical scenario at all.

Well said. It's around 60% of cases where parents are involved if I remember correctly.  This swarthy bogeyman tactic has been cynically used now for years by the McCanns ( remember the poor gypsy family with the blonde child who must have been stolen !?) and yes, plays on the fact that many people find it easier to believe foreigners are somehow of a different make-up and we as decent 'British' or Europeans haven't got it in us. It makes people feel better than accept the truth that parental abuse and murder of children goes on in all races and societies.

  The trafficking myth really annoys me because it also plays into this public fear and is based on nothing factual. There are children being shipped into Europe from Africa because they are poor ....there is nothing to suggest there is an industry of children from wealthy European countries being rounded up and sent to Africa, or the middle east, absolutely nothing to support it.

  Even with the recent case of missing Alesha MacPhail in the news there are people chomping at the bit to blame a few immigrant families on the island of Bute because they just can't conceive that 'one of our own' could do something so abhorrent. Sadly I think it will prove to be connected to people who have lived there much longer.

There is now a separate topic on Alesha MacPhail.

https://maddiemccannmystery.forumotion.co.uk/t2218-the-strange-case-of-alesha-macphail#104064