ROLAND WHITE reviews Death In The Desert: The Nurse Helen Mystery - 'How Foreign Office covered up the suspected murder of British nurse'

Daily Mail​

23-06-2025

Is there anything that politics can't make a great deal worse? One night in May 1979, a young nurse called Helen Smith was enjoying herself at an illegal alcohol party in a block of flats in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
She was dancing with a Dutch tugboat captain called Johannes Otten, and they eventually left together. That was the last time anybody saw them alive.
The following morning, Helen's body was found on the street outside, while Johannes was impaled on nearby railings. She was 23.
The Saudi authorities insisted the couple had accidentally fallen from a balcony while having sex. Last night's Death In The Desert (Ch4) made a convincing case that they were both murdered.
If they fell from the balcony, why weren't their bodies spotted by some fellow guests, who left the party at 3am?
Why weren't Helen's injuries consistent with a 70ft fall? A Home Office pathologist - who conducted a second post-mortem after a long campaign by her family - concluded she had probably been raped and beaten.
The producers of the documentary, using the Freedom of Information Act, managed to obtain 121 Foreign Office files about the case. These show that, behind the scenes, officials were far from convinced by the Saudis' story.
And the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire to report 'a strong suspicion that both people were murdered'.
The trouble was, nobody in government was prepared to say this out loud. It was politics, of course, that got in the way.
Margaret Thatcher had only recently become Prime Minister, and relations with Saudi Arabia were particularly delicate.
Ministers feared that any shift in the price of oil could cause inflation, which Mrs Thatcher was struggling to bring down.
If we offended the Saudis, they could also cancel valuable arms contracts.
To make matters worse, there was already tension between the two countries after ITV's Death Of A Princess documentary - about the execution of a Saudi princess for adultery.
As barrister Geoffrey Robertson put it: 'It's quite clear from these papers you've discovered that it suited the Foreign Office for this to go away'.
It did go away, eventually. This was partly because Helen's campaigning father Ron died, and partly because there was no obvious suspect.
Last month, the Mail reported a new development in a similar case. When Julie Ward was found dead in Kenya in 1988, local officials said she'd been eaten by lions.
But evidence now suggests that the late Jonathan Moi, son of former president Daniel arap Moi, should have been arrested.
It's reassuring, I suppose, that injustices like these can be exposed by newspapers and television programmes so many years later. By then, of course, it's usually far too late to do anything about it.