A coroner has said he is satisfied he has jurisdiction to hold an inquest into the death of a German backpacker murdered in Northern Ireland in 1988.
During a court hearing on Tuesday it emerged that a previous inquest appeared to have been opened in 1990 into Inga Maria Hauser’s death.
But coroner Joe McCrisken said it seemed to have closed without hearing any evidence or providing a verdict, adding that papers from the proceedings “simply can’t be found”.
The body of Ms Hauser from Munich was found in a remote forest near Ballycastle in Co Antrim 14 days after she was last seen alive on a ferry from Scotland.
The 18-year-old’s death in April 1988 remains one of the north’s most high-profile unsolved murders.
A nephew of Ms Hauser observed proceedings at Belfast’s Laganside Courthouse on Wednesday by videolink.
Opening the pre-inquest review hearing, counsel for the coroner Philip Henry told the court that a Form 21 had been issued previously over Ms Hauser’s death.
A Form 21 is issued to register a death where an inquest has been held.
Mr Henry said: “What we suspect has happened… and we are exploring this in a little bit of detail… what we strongly suspect has happened is a previous coroner in the 1990s has opened an inquest, not heard any evidence, and then issued a Form 21 by mistake.
“As I understand it, there was no evidence, there was no inquest and no formal proceedings as such.
“In those circumstances it would very much appear that the court has jurisdiction to proceed.”
Barrister for the family Malachy McGowan added: “I do not have any instructions that there was any evidence called or there was a full and formal inquest.”
Mr McCrisken said it raised the issue of whether he was permitted to proceed with the inquest.
He said: “I carried out some preliminary inquiries into the initial inquest.
“I use that term advisedly at this point, because an inquest has a very clear legal meaning in terms of the process, what it is supposed to do, arrive at a verdict, etc.
“It seemed to me that what happened in September 1990 was that the then coroner opened an inquest and then closed it without hearing any evidence and without testing any evidence and without, it seems, providing a verdict.
“In those circumstances that seemed to me to be an administrative exercise given that there was no verdict and and no evidence called and not in keeping with the legal interpretation of an inquest.
“I made some attempts to obtain the inquest papers, but they simply can’t be found. To be frank, that is the position we find ourselves in.
“At present I am satisfied that I am not functus officio and that I have jurisdiction to hold this long-awaited inquest into Ms Hauser’s death.”
Mr McCrisken said it seemed “highly unlikely” that there had been a full inquest in 1990 with no reporting of the proceedings.
He added: “I am going to move forward on the basis that I have jurisdiction and we can proceed.”
Mr Henry said the next step was to begin to process of obtaining documents from the police through the disclosure process.
He said: “There is quite a lot of work to do in relation to retrieval, examination of that material.
“It is always a little bit more difficult when it is of a historic nature but those are the challenges we are used to facing.”
Before her murder, Ms Hauser had travelled through England and Scotland and, according to diary entries, intended to travel south to Dublin after her ferry docked at Larne, Co Antrim.
For reasons unknown, she ended up going in the opposite direction and was found dead two weeks later in a remote part of Ballypatrick Forest.
Police have a male genetic profile found at the murder scene.
A number of years ago, in one of the largest DNA screenings undertaken in the UK, 2,000 samples failed to produce a definitive match.
In 2018, a year that marked the 30th anniversary of the murder, police made several arrests.
However, two years later prosecutors announced there was insufficient evidence to prosecute a man and a woman investigated in connection with the death.
The next review hearing has been listed for May 2.
