On the face of it, accidental death can be ruled out. Nora Quoirin clearly didn’t fall from the top of the ravine into it. When volunteers saw her body, they originally assumed that she was sleeping, which suggests they saw no obvious injuries or bleeding.

The fact that the volunteers who found her assumed Nora was elsewhere “and walked to the stream” also addresses the possibility that Nora was initially elsewhere, and that someone else had control or custody or knowledge of her corpse, and when the coast was clear, this person possibly walked to the stream with her body, and left her there.

Besides this, the body didn’t look at though it dropped or landed where it lay, but rather that either Nora herself purposefully and intentionally lay down there herself, or someone lay her down.

The way the body was laid out may indicate that Nora died in her sleep, either where she was found or somewhere else. The fact that she was naked may be due to environmental factors, or this was done intentionally by a third party to suggest something – for example a pedophile abduction.

We can also assume, from the way the body was presented, that either Nora wanted to be found [naked] or didn’t care if she was found in this way, or whoever left her there wanted her to be found [perhaps after a prescribed period of not wanting her to be found]. If the latter, who might experience such a change of heart and why after ten days, why not sooner, or later?

Now to address the question on its own merits: irrespective of where the body was found, it’s possible and even likely something happened to Nora somewhere else. It’s possible she fell inside the resort bungalow, or that some other accident occurred, relating to sedatives, or a medical reaction of some sort. So an accidental death is still possible, but the likelihood of some sort of cover up has also increased.

If this is true, and if we assume the potential involvement of family members, then the media attention was a deliberate smokescreen designed not to attract attention to Nora, or to the resort, but effectively to distract away from it, and to – effectively – the media.

Each time the police are giving press conferences it’s also a way to delay and divert the actual search. This isn’t the first time PR has been used to distort or disrupt an investigation.