Screaming her innocence, the aunt who killed Victoria

She called her 'my little daughter', the child she claimed to have loved and cared for through much of her pathetically short life.

To hear her speak, you might have thought that Marie Therese Kouao might now have an ounce of remorse for Victoria Climbie, the eightyearold girl who died such a terrifying death at her hands.

She was not a monster, she kept telling us, and had nothing to with Victoria's murder. Nothing to do with forcing her to eat excrement or scalding her with boiling water.

She never burned her with cigarettes, she never left her to freeze in a bin-liner.

Even if you were gullible enough to believe a word of her protestations of innocence yesterday, you might have found a certain irony in the fact that even Victoria's killer was now blaming everyone else for her death.

After all, that is precisely what most of the professional bodies which effectively allowed an innocent child to die have been doing.

It was the reason Kouao was ordered to interrupt her life sentence at Durham prison yesterday to give evidence at the official inquiry into what went wrong.

Evidence, as it turned out, was probably too strong a word.

What Kouao did instead was to harangue the inquiry for several hours about injustice, victimisation and, as she repeatedly insisted, her innocence.

Pictures showing burn marks on the child's face - among 128 injuries found on her body - were 'fakes', she maintained, and it was the doctors who had killed her with poor medical practices.

To the lay observer, none of this seemed to take the Victoria Climbie inquiry - five months and 110 witnesses on - forward much.

It certainly failed to impress Francis and Berthe Climbie, the parents who entrusted their daughter to the care of Kouao, her great aunt, in the hope she would get a better education in England than in her native Ivory Coast.

After listening for as long as she could bear to Kouao's 'testimony', Mrs Climbie fought back tears outside the inquiry room to declare: 'If Marie Therese Kouao loved my daughter, then my daughter would be in my arms today.'

It was about the first time anyone had made sense.

Kouao had been ordered to appear at the hearing in London after refusing to help investigators who questioned her in jail.

It was the first time she had spoken publicly about the case - and it is believed to be the only time a convicted killer has talked to an inquiry about their crime.

Witness number 111 was escorted by prison officers into the inquiry at Hannibal House, in Elephant and Castle, to sit just a few feet in front of Victoria's parents.

It took ten minutes of sometimes angry exchanges before counsel Neil Garnham QC and chairman Lord Laming persuaded her she should answer the questions.

For another half hour, Mr Garnham tried gamely to get her to deliver her evidence in customary question-and-answer form. When he came back after an adjournment, his tack was to throw the floor open to her. It would never be allowed in a criminal court, but here it seemed the only way.

Kouao filled the room with denials and rebuttals, and almost screamed her innocence.

With the hand that wasn't chained to a prison guard she wagged her finger at the lawyer and occasionally reinforced her point with a clenched fist.

Three rows behind her, Mr and Mrs Climbie simply watched. For them it merely underlined the unimaginable horror their daughter was forced to suffer.

Speaking alternately in English at 300 words a minute or through a French interpreter, Kouao claimed Victoria's parents didn't love her.

Victoria (or Anna, as she used to call her) had died not in her hands but at the hands of doctors who treated the child when she was finally taken into hospital.

Asked why the little girl had nothing in her stomach when examined by doctors on the Friday she died, Kouao claimed she had refused to eat.

Matter-of-factly, she explained: 'All day Wednesday she didn't eat.

All day Thursday she didn't eat. Friday she died.'

Her voice rising to a shriek, she claimed doctors had given Victoria the wrong medicine, that her tiny heart could not cope - and that her injuries had occurred only when she went to hospital.

She said Victoria was taken there because she was 'very tired and had scratched herself' after catching scabies. That was one reason there were marks on her.

The picture Mr Garnham painted was vastly different. The criminal court and the inquiry have already been told that Victoria was savagely beaten with a bicycle chain and a hammer.

Yesterday we heard how Victoria had been forced to stand to attention when questioned by Kouao.

Kouao denied ever having injured Victoria or leaving her to freeze in a bathroom, trussed up in a bin bag. 'I refuse to listen to this,' she said. 'How can you put a human in a rubbish bag? I was loving that little girl. She was my daughter in my heart.

'People are there to put everything on me to make me become a monster. I am a very good mum ... I know how to care for children.

'It is not because I took that little girl that she is dead. The reason why she is dead is because of the doctors. I came here to talk about the doctors and the social workers, not about something else.'

Her evidence over, Kouao was led out in manacles. It had taken nearly all day to hear her out, but nobody seemed much the wiser.

The Climbies' solicitor Imran Khan said one needed to listen to Kouao for only a few minutes to realise she was creating a 'tissue of lies' designed to mislead.

Nobody who did this could have been hoodwinked by her, he added.

'She is taking the same line as the agencies. Everyone blaming everybody else. No one accepting responsibility,' he said.

Previous inquiries into child abuse cases over the last decade have concluded such deaths must never be allowed to happen again.

If that is to be the case here, then there is clearly still a mountain to climb at Hannibal House.