PRESS ASSOCIATION -- Two women from Northern Ireland have been stabbed to death in Turkey.
A woman and her best friend, both from Northern Ireland, were stabbed to death on holiday in Turkey after she refused a waiter's proposal to marry her 15-year-old daughter, sources have said.
Marion Elizabeth Graham and Kathy Dinsmore, both aged 53 and from Newry, Co Down and described as inseparable, were found murdered in woods 75 miles north of Kusadasi.
It is understood a 17-year-old Turkish waiter, known to the family as Alex, confessed to the killings after concocting a story the women had been kidnapped.
The two women suffered multiple stab wounds, including having their throats cut, and their bodies were found in forest near a graveyard to the east of the port city of Izmir.
It is believed the waiter had asked Ms Graham for her daughter's hand in marriage but was refused. The women travelled with him out of Kusadasi on Thursday after Ms Graham's daughter Shannon went on a boat trip.
Raymond McGuinness, the girl's father and Ms Graham's ex-partner, said he was never fully in favour of the relationship since the two teens began going out last summer.
The alarm was raised on Thursday night when the waiter, said to have been in a distressed state, arrived for work in a Kusadasi restaurant.
He claimed he had suffered a cut to his hand trying to fight off kidnappers who had bundled the two women into a van. They had not been reported missing from their extended holiday at this stage.
Mr McGuinness is flying to Turkey on Saturday to bring his daughter home with her mother's body and that of her friend.
Monica Higgins called briefly to check on her sister Marion's home on the outskirts of Newry just after being told about the double murder.
"It's absolutely devastating. We've just found out. My mother's in the car crying her eyes out," she said. "We're trying to work with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs to find out what exactly happened to her."