|
|
 |
| |
Magdelana Zajdel and Patrick Linkavicius |
Murder jury to visit canalside
A MURDER trial will be in session today (Thursday) on the towpath of the Regent’s Canal at Camden Lock.
Old Bailey jurors have heard this week from prosecutor Richard Whittam, QC, that in an area frequented by street drinkers a Big Issue seller died from drowning in the murky waters.
“This case involved humanity in the raw,” Mr Whittam told the jury of six men and six women who will decide if Magdelana Zajdel murdered Patrick Linkavicius by deliberately forcing him to remain in the canal.
With a police escort, the jury, together with Judge Giles Forrester, court officials and a stenographer, will be taken to the canalside by coach.
Judge Forrester advised jurors to be prepared for rain.
“We will position ourselves on the bridge and then walk along the towpath to the other bridge and back,” he told them.
But it is unlikely that Miss Zajdel, a 24-year-old known as Magda and a familiar face in Camden Town, where she worked at Quinn’s pub in Kentish Town Road, will be present.
She denies murdering Mr Linkavicius, 30, a homeless father-of-two who was pronounced dead at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead on September 9, 2006.
By a tragic irony, passer-by David Collins, who stripped off and dived into the canal to haul him out the previous evening, has since died, aged just 30, said Mr Whittam.
Zajdel, from Poland, was arrested in April this year by detectives in Dublin, where she had been working as a street artist whose landscapes received wide praise.
Like Patrick Linkavicius, she was of no settled address in Camden Town.
The prosecutor alleged that after a row, probably triggered by drink, the pair swapped insults on the canal path and began pushing each other.
Mr Linkavicius is alleged to have inflamed the situation by calling her a “whore”, and was shoved into the water.
Jurors will have to decide, said Mr Whittam, if she physically prevented his escape from the canal by using her hands or a foot.
The case continues. |
 |
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
