Bishop’s plea for prayers

The Right Reverend Harold Miller of the Church of Ireland Down and Dromore Diocese said those who had observed the events of the past few months were “appalled by the way in which John McAreavey and others have been treated in and around the trial.”

The Bishop recalled his attendance at Michaela’s funeral 18 months ago which he said was a “great and awful privilege” to be there as a good friend of John’s uncle and namesake Bishop John McAreavey.

Bishop McAreavey had married the couple less than two weeks before Michaela’s murder.

The eight-week trial, which resulted in the acquittal of both men accused of the schoolteacher’s murder in Mauritius, revealed some of the horrors her widower John had endured, Bishop Miller said.

“We cannot imagine how any human being could go through so much pain,” he posted on the diocesan website. “It is devastating enough to lose your wife just days after the marriage, but to lose her through murder, then to be a suspect, and then to go through a trial in which your integrity is questioned and you have no result and closure must be extraordinarily difficult to bear.”

He made a plea for people to offer their prayers to the McAreavey and Harte families in the days ahead.

“I want to ask that we all hold the families in deep prayer and support every effort to bring this situation to a proper closure,” he said. “May they trust in the God who enters into our suffering and who, in the end, rights all injustices.”