Each anniversary of September 11 brings back familiar scenes: the collapse of the Twin Towers, ash and loose papers blanketing Lower Manhattan, and the solemn reading of every victim’s name.

Yet among the thousands included in that annual roll call is a life story with the devastating inevitability of a Greek tragedy.

John O’Neill, a leading FBI counterterrorism agent, resigned from the bureau in frustration only weeks before the 9/11 attacks. He believed his repeated warnings about Osama bin Laden had gone unheard.

At just 49, O’Neill was killed in the very attack he had spent years trying to prevent. After leaving the FBI, he had accepted a security position at the World Trade Center, placing him inside the doomed towers on September 11.

At the peak of his career, O’Neill served as special agent in charge of the national security division at the FBI’s New York field office. But he hardly fit the conventional image of a federal agent.

The son of Irish-American taxi drivers in Atlantic City, he favored slicked-back hair, a pinky ring, tailored Burberry suits and Bruno Magli shoes — a style that drew wisecracks from FBI colleagues dressed in more standard Men’s Warehouse attire.

He held court at Elaine’s, the famed Manhattan restaurant where journalists, diplomats and political figures traded information over dinner. Though married, O’Neill was also known for Chivas Regal-fueled late nights that often ran into early mornings at the office, prompting colleagues to wonder when, if ever, he slept.

O’Neill projected confidence in abundance, and by most accounts he inspired fierce loyalty or deep irritation — with little room in between.

‘He had this confidence, this arrogance, really, that made him own any room he walked into,’ Anna DiBattista, his girlfriend of seven years, told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.

Indeed, that cockiness he was renowned for stretched deep into his private life, too.

In the weeks and months following his death on September 11, the sordid details that would start spilling out ultimately proved to be just as tangled as his demise.

O’Neill, it transpired, had been juggling several overlapping lives and was involved with multiple women concurrently across different cities, none of whom knew about the others until contacted by a reporter writing his obituary.

There was Christine O’Neill in New Jersey, the high school sweetheart he wed in college with whom he had a son and a daughter who struggled with a congenital vision disorder that left her legally blind. They were living apart but were still married when he was killed.

There was longtime girlfriend Valerie James, whom he was living with in New York and told he was divorced. There was a woman named Mary Lynn Stevens in the Washington, DC area.

And there was DiBattista, who believed theirs was his only romance.

‘We discussed getting married (and) living in Europe all the time. He wanted to write a book,’ she told the Daily Mail.

O’Neill never tried to keep the blond hotel account director hidden.

DiBattista said he took her to FBI office parties, ambassadors’ homes and to meet Larry Silverstein, who had just taken control of the Trade Center. She met his parents and he had regular Monday night dinners with her mom, even when DiBattista wasn’t in town.

Looking back, she said she should have known that a man who spent his life keeping the nation’s secrets was always going to keep a few of his own.

‘I had my suspicions. But he was the ultimate spy. He knew how to manipulate and make you feel bad for asking about other women,’ she said, adding that even ‘with all his flaws and it’s sad, he was the love of my life.’

But for all his flair, it was his sober warnings about Islamic extremist attacks that largely defined him.

As the FBI’s top bin Laden hunter, O’Neill told anyone who would listen that bin Laden was the gravest threat America faced – years before most in Washington could place the name.

He believed it so fervently that he built a private archive of the Al Qaeda leader – including photographs, tapes, transcripts – and pored over it obsessively trying to spot a weakness and find some way to stop him.

Year after year, he told colleagues, congressional staffers and even foreign governments that Al Qaeda wasn’t just some distant threat. It was already here, already organized, hiding in plain sight, he insisted. In 1997, he said as much publicly, telling a room full of experts that terrorist groups had the infrastructure to strike inside the US whenever they chose.

He was also known for his impatience.

For O’Neill, the slow wheels of the federal government weren’t moving fast enough – especially after the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole near Yemen in 2000.

The often abrasive FBI agent kept butting heads with his bosses, other intelligence agencies and diplomats over coordination and bureaucratic constraints, insisting the danger was bigger and more urgent than any of them wanted to admit.

By 2001, his bosses finally pushed back, turning on him for misusing an FBI car, losing a bureau-issued PalmPilot and finally misplacing a briefcase containing classified documents for a few hours during an FBI conference.

He knew they were careless screw-ups but inside an agency where he made enemies as an outspoken maverick, those missteps weren’t the reason he was pushed out – they were the excuse.

By August 2001, he was fed up with a bureau that sweated the small stuff while ignoring his warnings about a mass terror threat and he resigned after 31 years at the FBI.

For a man who, as Esquire once reported, was nearly $300,000 in debt, his new job heading security at the World Trade Center offered some peace of mind, paying more than twice his FBI salary. It also offered a challenge: Al Qaeda had already tried to bring the towers down once in 1993 and he repeatedly told colleagues and friends they would try to do it again.

He turned out to be right.

After only 19 days on the job, O’Neill was in his 34th floor office on the morning of September 11 when the first plane hit the towers.

Between the time the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. and the South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m., news reports noted that he had left the building briefly to contact a handful of loved ones – including his son J.P and lovers, Anna DiBattista and Valerie James – to assure them all that he was safe.

As reported by Esquire in 2002, he also took the time to message Fran Townsend, then a senior Justice Department official who went on to become US Homeland Security Advisor to President George W. Bush.

‘…What he sent her at the end of his life was a page written in the numerical code he’d developed for his communications to her, and it was amazing how personal it was, how elaborate, how much time it must have taken him to write it, even in the midst of historic catastrophe, even in the midst of hideous carnage, even in the last few ticks of his existence,’ the article read.

It described O’Neill as ‘obsessed’ with Townsend — married with two kids — because she knew ‘all his different lives.’

‘He could tell her things because they both had (security) clearances. I think she understood things about him that others didn’t,’ DiBattista said.

She told the Daily Mail Townsend asked her to meet around the time of O’Neill’s memorial service in Manhattan where they had a private conversation about him.

When asked by phone about her relationship with O’Neill, Townsend — a longtime national security contributor to CNN before her stint as on-air senior national security analyst for CBS News until 2022 — hung up on the Daily Mail.

Reports of all the people O’Neill reached out to during those crucial 73 minutes beg the question: With the towers already burning, was the man responsible for their security spending his final hour managing his many relationships instead of their evacuation?

By several accounts, after leaving the building to contact loved ones, he then went back in to help others escape.

O’Neill was spotted briefly in Frenchman Jules Naudet’s famous video footage from the Trade Center lobby that morning and was last seen heading toward the South Tower. It collapsed shortly after, killing him at age 49.

It took recovery workers days to identify his body in the wreckage of a collapsed stairwell.

In the wake of his death, his personal entanglements went unspoken when the federal government dedicated the FBI’s staging area facility at Ramstein Air Base in Germany to his memory in 2006. And they still go unspoken each year that the FBI honors him on its Wall of Honor, and the FBI Agents Association commemorates him in its statements marking 9/11 anniversaries.

The legend of John O’Neill glosses over the careless slip-ups, the deceptions, the double life in favor of a cleaner narrative: a hero who spent his final moments running toward danger instead of away from it.

His story became immortalized in a PBS Frontline episode called ‘The Man Who Knew,’ a book by Murray Weiss entitled ‘The Man Who Warned America’ and in the Esquire’s profile headlined ‘The Man Who Was Supposed To Save Us.’ He also became the central figure of Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower, and later a Hulu series based on the book, with Jeff Daniels playing him just as DiBattista described him – brilliant, mercurial, a man nobody could rein in.

Twenty-five years later, the uncomfortable question remains: What might have happened if anyone in Washington had listened to O’Neill sooner? Nobody has an answer.

What’s certain is simpler, more personal, and no less tragic – that the man who spent his life warning the towers might fall was standing beneath them when they did.

‘Haunting, isn’t it?’ DiBattista said.

Blanche d’Alpuget, the acclaimed author who chronicled Bob Hawke’s life, knew the former prime minister more intimately than almost anyone. Aside from Hawke’s first wife, Hazel, few were better placed to describe him as “perpetually unfaithful”.

D’Alpuget, who died on Tuesday at the age of 82, spoke openly over the years about her complicated romance with Hawke. Their passionate affair stretched across decades before becoming a marriage that lasted nearly 25 years.

Their story began at a Jakarta party in April 1970. D’Alpuget was then living in Indonesia with her first husband, diplomat Tony Pratt, while Hawke was married to Hazel and raising their three young children.

At the time, Hawke was already one of the biggest names in Australia’s union movement as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. But d’Alpuget, who had spent years abroad, had no idea she was meeting a man who would one day lead the Labor Party and become prime minister.

“I’d been living overseas for nine years … I didn’t know who the hell he was,” she later recalled during an interview with the ABC’s Conversation Hour.

In another reflection on their first encounter, d’Alpuget said she initially believed his name was Robin. “He sat down and we talked a lot,” she said. “And I thought, ‘You’re a good guy.’”

The pair crossed paths again roughly six years later, when d’Alpuget was working on a biography of Sir Richard Kirby, the longtime president of the Australian Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

D’Alpuget, who was 14 years younger than Hawke, said she immediately felt a powerful “energy” between them. Speaking to Conversation Hour, she said she knew from that moment their attraction would eventually be acted upon.

‘Neither of us said a thing about it… we knew we would become lovers that night,’ she said.

By then, d’Alpuget’s marriage was ‘going down the drain,’ she said in another interview – ‘the click was different’ and ‘affairs were par for the course’.

Hawke and d’Alpuget became lovers and arranged trysts when they could for much of the next 20 years.  

‘I’ve been in love with Bob since 1976,’ she told news.com.au in 2018, a year before Hawke’s death. 

‘I fell in love with his character. He was a man of absolutely good character, as far as I was concerned. 

‘He was clever and genuinely charismatic. He’s a man of enormous compassion, and I saw all of those things.’ 

D’Alpuget also always understood she was not the only woman Hawke was seeing outside his marriage, stating he was ‘having affairs with women all over the country’. 

She once told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘He was charming, funny and straightforward… what he loved was sex.’

After 20 years of marriage, d’Alpuget was still happily talking about the couple’s sex life in 2015.

‘I think sexual attraction is very important – it is to me – but I’ve always liked sex,’ she told The Australian.

‘I think sexual attraction, honestly, if it’s intense, really can stand the test of time. We’re the living example of it.’

Hawke first asked d’Alpuget to marry him in 1978 when he woke in a Canberra hotel room after a vivid dream but a year later changed his mind.

The aspiring politician believed divorcing Hazel could ruin his chance of one day leading the country, d’Alpuget revealed in her 2018 book On Lust and Longing.

‘As it turned out, he made the right decision: for himself, for me, for his family, for mine, for his party – and, as became obvious, for the nation,’ she wrote.

Hawke’s liaisons with d’Alpuget were an open secret in Canberra but Hazel clung steadfastly to her philandering husband.

‘Each of us asked the other to leave,’ d’Alpuget said of her paramour’s wife. ‘Neither of us did.’ 

D’Alpuget actually penned two works about Hawke. The first was Robert J. Hawke: A Biography, published in 1982, the year before he was elected prime minister.

The second was Hawke: The Prime Minister, released in 2010, 19 years after he lost the Labor leadership to Paul Keating and 15 years into their marriage.

Hawke and d’Alpuget had become particularly close while she was writing the first biography but had little or no contact during the early years of his prime ministership.

D’Alpuget divorced Pratt, with whom she had a son, in 1986 and a chance phone call from Hawke reignited the affair, which continued after he left The Lodge.

In 1993, d’Alpuget was in a light plane crash in Far North Queensland, which led to Hawke taking their relationship more seriously after he feared she was dead and realised the depth of his feelings for her.

READ MORE: Fans Praise Emotional 9/11 Tribute Before Subway Series Showdown

‘A friend who was our go-between rang him up and told him,’ she told the Sydney Institute in 2018. ‘Bob said he felt himself die and that was it.

‘At that moment, he decided. He suddenly took the relationship extraordinarily seriously and made it clear to me. But it was timing. It was an angel, holy angels.’

Hawke and Hazel – who was much loved by the Australian public – jointly announced their separation after 38 years of marriage in November 1994. 

The nation was scandalised when Hawke and d’Alpuget made their romance public in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes in February the following year. 

That tell-all sit-down was memorable for d’Alpuget rubbing suntan lotion onto Hawke’s body as the besotted couple recounted their long love story. 

D’Alpuget faced a vicious backlash for replacing Hazel but overcame being dubbed ‘the most hated woman in Australia’.

‘As for people disapproving of me, I figured that was their problem,’ she told the ABC in November last year. ‘They were acting in prejudice and ignorance.

‘If you’re very in love with somebody, that love so enhances your life and your attitude, that negativity doesn’t have much chance of getting a foothold.’

D’Alpuget said the reaction to her coming out from the shadows to declare her love for Hawke was harder on him.  

‘It took an enormous amount of courage on Bob’s part,’ she told The Australian.

‘It took much more courage on his part than on mine. Because I was a single woman, divorced. But he was married. 

‘The whole country expected him to behave in this way and was unaware of what his true feelings were and so were bound to be shocked, angered and amazed when they discovered them.’

Hawke and d’Alpuget – dubbed ‘B1 and B2’ after ABC kids show Bananas in Pyjamas – married in July 1995 and remained together until his death in May 2019, aged 89. 

D’Alpuget said in a statement marking his loss: ‘Today we lost Bob Hawke, a great Australian – many would say the greatest Australian of the post-war era.’

‘Bob was dearly loved by his family, and so many friends and colleagues,’ she continued. ‘We will miss him.’ 

Later that month, d’Alpuget described the final years of her life with Hawke to the ABC’s Leigh Sales. 

‘We were so close and intimate during that time, while I was his main carer,’ she said. ‘And we often said to each other, we’ve been blessed to have this period together.

‘We didn’t have the joy of young love. He had that with Hazel. We had the joy of mature love and then the love of old age.’

D’Alpuget also admitted feeling sorry for Hazel, who died in 2013 aged 83.

‘I used to feel very sad for Hazel… my feelings about Hazel’s sadness didn’t change,’ she said. ‘I still always really up until the end felt that sorrow.’

Six months after Hawke’s death, d’Alpuget was asked by The Project’s Lisa Wilkinson if her husband ever felt guilty about his infidelity.

‘He was perpetually unfaithful,’ she said. ‘He loved Hazel and he was perpetually unfaithful.

‘Bob was not a faithful husband. I didn’t feel I was doing anything bad.’

Most of Hawke’s ashes were interred at Sydney’s Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium – the rest are in the Prime Ministers Memorial Garden at Melbourne General Cemetery.

When Hawke almost died of a stomach bug he picked up in the Middle East in 2015, d’Alpuget chose Macquarie Park as the place they would one day lie together.   

‘The graves are side-by-side,’ she said. ‘We chose a spot where the public can come. It’ll be nice. 

‘It’s in a rose garden and there’s a seat there so if a member of the public wants to come and have a sit, they can.’

– READ MORE: CHARLES WOOLEY: After Blanche D’Alpuget sensuously rubbed oil into Bob Hawke’s back, I asked: ‘When did the sex begin?’ It sparked a firestorm that haunts me to this day 

Lime bikes have become a familiar nuisance on pavements across the country.

A Daily Mail investigation has uncovered why riders who abandon rented e-bikes across streets and walkways are so often able to avoid consequences.

The technology used by Lime has serious shortcomings, our findings suggest, allowing riders in certain locations to leave bikes wherever they choose without facing a penalty.

Enforcement appeared so limited that our reporter was able to leave bikes blocking London landmarks and outside multi-million-pound homes without receiving any warning or fine. This was despite the operator’s pledge to punish poor parking.

The result has been disorder in towns and cities nationwide, with rows of 80lb electric bikes obstructing access to railway stations and businesses.

California-based e-bike company Lime operates in cities around the UK, including Salford, Nottingham, Oxford and Milton Keynes.

Poor parking has been especially persistent in London, where some councils do not require customers to leave bikes in designated bays.

Lime says that in these ‘dockless’ areas, users must leave their bikes ‘neatly to the side of the pavement’. 

Guidance on its website says riders ‘should always be considerate of other pavement users’ and lists five parking rules.

Riders are asked to take a photo of how they have parked and upload it to Lime’s app.

But the Mail has found that this does little to ensure its rules are followed. Our investigation spanned three south London boroughs that allow dockless parking: Wandsworth, Southwark and Greenwich.

We discovered that, when parking in a spot clearly obstructing a footpath or entrance, the Lime app displayed a message stating: ‘Move vehicle out of footpath: To help everyone get past, move your vehicle away from footpaths, entrances and ramps.’

But each time our reporter was able to ignore this message and park the bike.

READ MORE: Prosecutor: KJ Biermann Charged in Separate Sexual Incident

It meant we were able to walk away from bikes blocking entrances to the likes of the Greenwich Theatre and the Globe Theatre, despite the app recognising that it was obstructing pedestrians. We even managed to leave a bike on the steps of Southwark Cathedral.

The app also allowed us to park bikes inside the porches of multimillion pound houses.

The Lime app was better at preventing parking in ‘exclusion zones’, such as those surrounding the Cutty Sark and Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, but this was not always the case.

We managed to park bikes in the middle of bustling markets in Borough and Greenwich, which are supposed to be protected by exclusion zones. Our reporter moved all the bikes after they had been parked.

Lime has said that users who don’t park according to its rules receive a warning, followed by escalating fines of up to £20 before repeat offenders are banned from its service.

However, the Mail was not issued a single warning despite committing 26 parking contraventions.

Lime has struggled to tackle the issue because its GPS technology is not accurate enough to determine whether a bike has been parked properly.

Just last week, Lime apologised to a blind couple after an app glitch led to bikes blocking pavements in Bromley, south-east London, where the firm’s bikes are not permitted, forcing them to walk across a busy main road with their guide dog.

Earlier this year, Lime announced that it was rolling out new bikes with improved GPS technology, which it said would make ‘a huge difference’ to parking enforcement.

But Erik Matthies, policy lead at the Royal National Institute of Blind People, said its efforts ‘clearly still fall short of what is needed’.

Mr Matthies, who has sight loss, said e-bikes ‘present a danger’ to blind and partially sighted people when parked badly.

A Lime spokesman said: ‘Proper parking is important to Lime and we take instances of misparked vehicles seriously.

‘This year alone we’ve issued hundreds of thousands of warnings and tens of thousands of fines to riders who parked incorrectly in London.’

Castleblayney, the close-knit Co Monaghan market town where family names run deep and generations remain closely connected, is united in grief. In a community of this size, personal tragedy is felt far beyond one household.

That shared sense of loss is expected to bring a large turnout to Our Lady of Knock Church next Friday, when former local woman Thomasina Tobin, née McArdle, and her husband Patrick are laid to rest. Many in the town are anticipated to attend.

The deaths of the highly regarded couple have stunned residents. Thomasina was born and reared in Castleblayney before relocating to London, where she met and married Patrick, a New Zealander. Their family and friends have been left searching for answers following the devastating events of a Spanish summer holiday two weeks ago.

Thomasina and Patrick were found dead in the early hours of August 25 after using the hot tub at their luxury holiday villa in Cullera, a Mediterranean coastal village south of Valencia.

Their bodies were discovered by their children, a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, both of whom have mild special needs. The teenagers are now being cared for at the family home near Greenwich Park in London, with relatives taking turns to support them.

The traumatic circumstances of the past several weeks have been hard for the family and wider community to comprehend, particularly for the couple’s devastated children.

However, the family may now be moving closer to an explanation for the deaths of their loved ones.

A number of possible causes had been considered, including chemical poisoning and overheating. The leading theory was that the pair drowned after becoming trapped in the hot tub when a fault allegedly caused a powerful suction effect.

Foul play, and the involvement of any third party, were quickly ruled out.

Now, however, a family friend, speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, has revealed that the Spanish coroner investigating the deaths has informed grieving friends that electrocution is the most likely cause of death, and that it seems that Patrick died trying to rescue his wife of almost two decades, after she got into difficulty in the water.

‘There was total confusion about how such an awful thing could have happened and to some extent there still is,’ the friend said.

‘The police said it was some sort of [hot tub] accident, but we could not figure out how this could have happened and taken both of their lives.

‘I understand now that the coroner’s report puts the cause of death down to electrocution and that one of them was found in the [hot tub] and one of them was next to it.

‘The assumption is that Paddy was trying to drag Thomasina out. She was really small, but he was still wet and was then electrocuted himself.’

The family, he said, are still trying to piece together the chronology of this unthinkable tragedy as they wait for answers on who – if anyone – is ultimately responsible.

The source added: ‘The family don’t have a clear picture of what happened yet but electrocution sounds more plausible than a suction issue.’

He added: ‘Of course this should never have happened so I am sure there will be further action in the future.’

In Cullera, as the holiday season draws to a close, the luxury, cliff-top, £2,600 a week three-storey villa Mr and Mrs Tobin had booked for their two-week summer break, remains closed, its shutters drawn.

Spanish families have left the town, returning to their city lives and the daily grind.

Tourists have been replaced by a steady trail of investigators and police officers, all tasked with trying to piece together the final hours of the Tobin family.

The hard facts, such as they are, are these: Thomasina, Patrick and the two children left London on August 22, two days before the fatal accident occurred. They had planned to stay for just over two weeks to make the most of the children’s summer holidays before the start of school term this week.

Both hardworking professionals, Mrs Tobin, 51, was a high-flying quantity surveyor for luxury hotels at the consultancy firm Turner & Townsend, while Mr Tobin had recently been promoted to manager at the London branch of HCLTech, an Indian company that specialises in digital engineering, cloud and AI products.

Villa Luna undoubtedly offered an escape from the couple’s hectic working lives. Spreading over 2,691 sq ft, the home offers panoramic views of the Mediterranean alongside a private pool, an outdoor BBQ area, as well as the romantic indoor spa area.

Photos of the ground floor ‘oasis’ show the inviting hot tub with a bottle of champagne and two glasses on the side, as a powerful marketing tool, while the property’s website describes the space as being made for ‘moments of pure relaxation’.

Relaxing is what Mr and Mrs Tobin had planned to do on that fateful afternoon of August 24. According to police, the family had enjoyed a BBQ on the terrace, followed by a swim in the pool.

Later in the day, the children headed up to their rooms while the couple made the most of the spa facilities in the basement.

While the timeline of how their quiet downtime turned to disaster is still incomplete, initial autopsy results, reported by local media, said both died from cardiopulmonary arrest.

Investigators are now going with the theory that this was caused after both suffered a fatal electric shock.

How and why this occurred – whether it was caused by a malfunction in the hot tub itself or from an outside source – is still unclear.

Early findings from the scene, however, seem to indicate that Mrs Tobin was in the water when the shock occurred while her husband was fatally injured while desperately trying to drag her out – his still wet arms acting like a conductor for the electrical current. He died outside the water, at the side of the tub.

Superficial injuries allegedly found on their bodies seemed to suggest some sort of struggle or rescue attempt.

It is not the first time that a couple have been electrocuted in a hot tub on holiday.

In July last year, Estephania López and her children watched her husband Sagid, 36, die at a hotel resort in Ixtapa, Mexico, after he was electrocuted in the water. His wife claimed the hotel was negligent due to the ‘lack of maintenance’ on the tub.

Similarly, in June 2024, Lizette Zambrano filed a $1million lawsuit after her American husband Jorge was killed in a hot tub of a Mexican hotel, alleging faulty wiring caused his death. Ms Zambrano was also dragged out the tub with no pulse, only surviving after bystanders successfully carried out CPR.

For almost 12 hours, the lifeless bodies of Thomasina and Patrick remained in the spa until their son made the grim discovery at around 5am the next day. The teenager had gone to wake his parents for their planned sunrise trip to the beach but found their bed still made up from the previous day.

After searching the house, he found them in the spa and quickly alerted his older sister. Together, the siblings rang a family member before searching the streets of the gated community until they found a neighbour who helped them call emergency services.

Paramedics, along with local police and the Guardia Civil, quickly arrived at the property, but the couple were pronounced dead at the scene.

The understandably shocked and speechless children were then taken into the care of the Spanish Red Cross and Cullera City Council, with psychologists offering support, until relatives in the UK and Ireland could be reached.

The children were reunited with three family members in the early hours of Wednesday morning – with their parents’ bodies being removed from the property late that night. The family initially remained in Cullera while investigations continued but returned to the UK at the beginning of this week.

It is not known whether Thomasina and Patrick’s bodies have already been repatriated to Ireland.

Almost three weeks on, the Guardia Civil refuses to give any further insight into their version of events and insist they are still waiting to hear back on toxicology reports, sent to a lab in Barcelona.

Local newspaper, Las Provincias, reported earlier this week that the investigation will now focus on whether there are any criminal or civil liabilities: either on the part of the owners of the holiday home or of the hot tub manufacturer.

The judge overseeing the case ordered an expert to inspect the hot tub to identify any potential malfunction and on Thursday an individual from Andrey Pool Service, thought to have been brought in to investigate the working of the tub, was seen leaving the property but refused to speak to journalists.

The CEO of Goccia Spa – the company that supplied a hot tub installed at the villa in 2019 – last week insisted the spa bath shown in images online was not from his company. Even if it was, he said, the warranty would have run out more than two years ago.

Carlos Navarro told the Daily Mail: ‘Our hot tubs have a two-year warranty and the one we sold to the owner was over eight years ago, so the liability lies with them.’

Meanwhile the owners of the Colina Del Sol holiday complex – where Villa Luna sits alongside two other properties behind electric gates – continue to refuse to speak about the case. The brothers and business moguls Adam and Michal Markuszewski, however, have this week instructed lawyers who specialise in both civil and criminal law.

When approached by the Daily Mail, lawyers for the owners said there were no criminal charges or civil law suits against their clients and added, ‘We maintain and reiterate that the unit was functioning correctly. No customer ever reported any malfunction.’

Worlds away back in Ireland and Greenwich, however, the heartbreaking task now begins of laying the couple to rest and deciding the best future for their children, who returned to their family home this week orphaned.

‘After the news spread, there was a rush to get over to Valencia and support the kids. Now the family have all gathered back in Ireland and I believe one of Thomasina’s sisters has gone to London to look after the children,’ the family friend added.

‘I don’t know what will happen with them. Obviously social services are involved and maybe they’ll end up moving to Ireland or someone will move to them — it’s just too early to say. They were a lovely, really close family.’

Mr and Mrs Tobin, described as the ‘perfect couple’ by friends, had first met almost 20 years ago, when both were working at Nokia in London. While neither native to the capital, they decided to stay put, raising their children in a four-bedroom house close to Greenwich Park.

‘They were such a super chilled couple and family. I can’t believe it,’ one friend in the neighbourhood said this week.

‘They’ve lived in London for years. I think it was a very happy marriage. They seemed the perfect couple. It always looked like they loved each other.’

It was only a few weeks ago that Mrs Tobin, who is one of nine children, had been back to Ireland to celebrate her sister’s 60th birthday. She’d been in ‘really good form’, the family source remembers, and had been looking forward to her forthcoming holiday.

The McArdle family are well known throughout Ireland due to Mrs Tobin’s father, Tommy McArdle, 87, who is the former director of Irish broadcaster RTE and goalkeeper for the Monaghan Football Team in the Fifties and Sixties.

It is unsurprising then how the community of Castleblayney have gathered to support the popular and well-loved family, with hundreds of tributes flooding in memory of the ‘loving and devoted parents’.

A planned ‘Class of 91’ school reunion, organised by Thomasina’s old classmates at the Our Lady secondary school in Castleblayney, the weekend after the tragedy, was called off, with everyone instead meeting for a quiet drink to be ‘mindful of the bereaved families’.

Meanwhile, the former President of Ireland Mary McAleese offered deepest sympathies to ‘all the clan’ adding: ‘what awful grief you all have to bear’.

For while hundreds of mourners expected to gather at the end of next week are still coming to terms with the shock, everybody’s thoughts remain with those two teenagers, navigating their new reality in a family suddenly torn apart.