Spanish journalist claims that Kirsty Maxwell death treated carelessly due to being British

A Scottish reporter who has been covering the Kirsty Maxwell case has said that the tragic death may not have been given the attention it deserved from Spanish authorities due to her nationality and age.

Kirsty Maxwell and her mother Denise Curry enjoying a drink.

Kirsty Mckenzie - a Scottish journalist working for the Olive Press in Spain - said that following her investigation for MTV and Olive Press into the death, authorities may have treated the case as another horror story involving a young Brit drunk abroad.

And Mckenzie alleges that the evidence all pointed to something more complex having occurred that night and that Spanish authorities were close to being ‘contemptuous’ in their handling of the death.

Kirsty, from Livingston, lost her life after falling from the tenth floor of the apartment block ‘My Pretty Palma’ on April 27 2017 while on a hen do with friends.

The 27-year-old is believed to have mistakenly walked up to the wrong apartment that neighboured her friends. The apartment belonged to five British men from around the Nottingham area.

No case was brought by the Spanish legal authorities against the five men and last year three Spanish judges made the decision to shelve the case.

READ MORE: Kirsty Maxwell family's fury over reports case has been dropped in Spain

In her opinion piece Mckenzie said: “What I found over the course of my investigation in Benidorm is that Kirsty’s age and nationality are potentially why the Spanish justice system failed her.

“It is possible to them she was just another drunk Brit abroad, her death all too easily filed away as an accident. The true mystery, we discover in the documentary, isn’t what happened in Kirsty’s final moments. It’s how the Spanish authorities were able to treat her case with a carelessness that bordered on contempt.

"As for the theories buzzing round true crime forums, the more I investigated, the less they made sense. It’s almost impossible to imagine that Kirsty was suicidal or sleepwalking as some Reddit threads suggest. Her father said that she was ‘happy and full of life’ and ‘never slept walked in her life.

"What we still don’t know is what led her to leave her bedroom, less than an hour after friends captured a video of her peacefully snoring in bed.

“I wonder now, in retrospect, whether the crazy theories, the tabloid outrage, the accusations of drinking too much, the smug ‘Why was she in a room with five men’ — stemmed from blind fear, from needing to erect a clear barrier between people who behave on abroad and the people that end up losing their lives. But the truth is, Kirsty is exactly like us, exactly like anyone on holiday. Optimistic, care free. Full of life.”

She goes on to say that she feels that the only barriers to discovering the truth seem to be the Spanish authorities.

READ MORE: Kirsty Maxwell's family call for Scotland to adopt coroners system four years on from her death

When the journalist was carrying out her investigations she says that they uncovered multiple missteps made by the police and that all attempts to get the police or Spanish legal system to address this was met either with hostility or silence.

She added: "We need justice for Kirsty’s family. We need to make sure that when a foreigner dies abroad, the case is always treated with respect, sympathy and above all, without wrongdoing. What happened to Kirsty could happen to us, and that is terrifying."

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