A Bosnian coroner yesterday ruled out foul play in the death of Irish pilgrim Winnie Brady, but said it may never be possible to determine exactly what killed her.
After conducting a postmortem on the remains of Ms Brady (59), who disappeared from the village of Medjugorje four months ago, the coroner said there was no sign of assault, but an exact time and cause of death could not be established.
A hunter found Ms Brady's body last Sunday on the rugged and rarely visited slopes behind Apparition Hill, where six Medjugorje children claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1981.
Pictures found in the camera she was carrying suggest Ms Brady climbed Apparition Hill on September 6th, the last day she was seen alive, and may have spent the night there, before walking over the crest of the hill and down the slope where her body was discovered.
She seems to have taken photographs from that location the following day, when she was reported missing. The last two pictures that Ms Brady took were of her badly swollen left foot and ankle, leading to speculation that she may have injured herself on the rocky hill or been bitten by one of snakes that are common in the area. She was wearing light, open-toed sandals when she disappeared.
The coroner said it was not possible to determine how long Ms Brady had survived on the hillside, but it was not likely to have been more than a day or two at most.
The initial search for Ms Brady was hampered by a lack of clues: she left most of her belongings in the guesthouse, did not tell friends where she was going, and no one could be sure that they had seen her outside the guesthouse on the day she vanished.
She also had a painful, arthritic knee that led investigators to believe that she could not have climbed Apparition Hill, about 1.5km from the village, and certainly not continued over the crest and across the rough terrain behind it, where she was ultimately found.
Thick summer vegetation would also have made her body extremely hard to spot, despite the efforts of a hundreds-strong search party, police, soldiers and a helicopter.
Ms Brady's husband, Stephen, and her brother, Phillip Shevlin, hope to return from Medjugorje to Dublin today. Her body is to be flown home next week.