Mark Williams-Thomas said this in an interview with Belgium’s TV Limburg (TVL) yesterday following a week-long fact-finding mission in the Malaysian capital.
“I have no doubt. From the evidence that I have collected this week, and other information that we have through the forensics, we are in a position to say very clearly: If this was being dealt with in the UK, it would be treated as a homicide investigation,” he said in the telephone interview broadcast on TVL.
In a Twitter posting on Saturday, the former British policeman had promised to reveal more in his final findings.
Williams-Thomas, who won a Peabody Award for documentary work exposing TV and radio personality Jimmy Savile as a paedophile in 2012, had formerly worked on other high-profile investigations with the British police force.
On Dec 7 last year, Ivana’s nude body was found on the balcony of an apartment on the sixth floor of a building on Persiaran Capsquare, off Jalan Dang Wangi.
She was said to have earlier been in the apartment of a couple, an American man and his Kazakh wife, on the 20th floor. Police assumed she had fallen down.
It was reported that she had earlier been out drinking with the couple in Bangsar before returning with them to their apartment.
Police have classified the case as sudden death pending the results of the post-mortem and pathology tests. These results have not been revealed until now.
Her body was kept at a hospital morgue in Kuala Lumpur for 21 days before being repatriated to the Netherlands.
Smit was cremated in her birth town of Roermond in the Netherlands on Dec 30 in a grand send-off which received wide coverage in the media.
Earlier, a pathologist who conducted Ivana’s second post-mortem had said he found bruises on her arms which he said were likely inflicted before her fall.
In his initial findings, Dr Frank van der Goot said the bruises on Ivana’s upper arms indicated that a struggle had likely taken place before she plunged to her death.
“We have also found drugs that might have been consumed long before her death,” he told FMT.
According to van der Goot, these included several highly toxic drugs.
Besides cocaine, he said traces of the para-Methoxymethamphetamine (pMMA) drug were found in Ivana’s system. The combination of pMMA with cocaine could be lethal, he added.