The "phantom AFP" officer flown into Croatia for the Britt Lapthorne case, has been snapped by LIVENEWS.com.au in Dubrovnik, after he was labelled a “political tool”.
Yesterday, Britt’s father Dale Lapthorne, who is in Dubrovnik, told 2GB’s Chris Smith the “phantom officer” was in town for five days before he made contact with him.
Today Britt Lapthorne's family expect to wait ten days to find out whether a body recovered off the coast is the missing Australian backpacker.
Ms Lapthorne, provided blood samples and his 21-year-old daughter’s dental records to pathologists in the Croatian city, who will use DNA analysis to identify the remains after an autopsy proved inconclusive.
"They said it would be ten days, they said nothing more," Mr Lapthorne said.
"That's what the official line they're taking is."
"I expected to sit down for an hour, an hour-and-a-half today to catch up on some things and that wasn't the case.
"Pretty short, pretty brief, just telling me basically it will take some time. That's it."
The body, recovered yesterday, was so badly decomposed police said they could not tell whether it was a man or a woman.
A local fisherman spotted the body floating in waters near the town centre where Ms Lapthorne vanished in the early hours of September 18.
Dubrovnik police have said the body was unlikely to be Ms Lapthorne because it was too badly decomposed to have been in the water for less than three weeks.
But in a similar case in Porec, north-west Croatia, three years ago, an early forensic assessment suggested the body had been in the sea for several months when it turned out to be murdered British tourist Peter Rushton, who went missing five weeks earlier.
