[Benjamin]

Dingo baby case re-opens in Australia with new inquest

By Nick Bryant

BBC News, Sydney


Azaria's father has been pressing for a new inquest, citing new evidence of dingo attacks on humans Thirty years after the disappearance of baby Azaria Chamberlain, whose parents always claimed she was taken by a dingo, Australia is preparing a new inquest to try to resolve the question.

Azaria's mother, Lindy, was found guilty of murder in 1982.

But she was later exonerated after a piece of the baby's clothing was found in an area full of dingo lairs.

Sources in the Northern Territory have told The Melbourne Age newspaper a new inquest would likely open next year.

It will examine the question of whether the baby was taken by a dingo.

'Death unknown'

Ten-week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from a campsite in the Australian outback in 1980, and virtually ever since, the country has been engrossed by the question of whether the baby was taken by a dingo.

That was how her parents always explained Azaria's disappearance, but two years later Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton was found guilty of her baby's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Later she was exonerated on all charges, after the chance discovery of a fragment of Azaria's clothing in an area dotted with dingo's lairs.

But even after three colonial inquests, two appeals and a Royal Commission, the certificate currently lists the cause of death as unknown.

Azaria's father, Michael Chamberlain, has been pressing for a new inquest, citing new evidence of dingo attacks on humans and the killing of a nine-year-old child by two dingoes in 2001.

The legal record already states that the Chamberlains are innocent.

But they want it to go further and to say, definitively, that a dingo took their baby.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11511581