A Scot who lost her life savings when her Sri Lankan toy boy husband was murdered has launched a desperate bid to be reunited with her treasured possessions.
Pensioner Diane Peebles wed hotel worker Priyanjana De Zoysa, 26, after meeting him on holiday in 2011 and gave him £100k to build them a life there - but he was shot dead in 2017 after it emerged he had a second younger wife.
The 65-year-old, from Edinburgh, managed to scrape together enough money to return to Scotland the following year but with the house she left behind in her dead husband’s name now occupied by her in-laws, she has lost all hope of clawing any of her savings back.
Instead, she is desperately trying to fundraise enough cash to be reunited with her worldly possessions left behind in Sri Lanka before they’re lost forever - including priceless family pictures of her late parents.
Diane said: “I have 20 boxes of belongings there. I left everything I had.
“My family photographs are stuck there. A lot have been destroyed because mice got into the box and chewed them.
“There is a mahogany table my dad made me which is very sentimental to me. It will be in a bit of a state now but if I can get it back to Scotland my brother can restore it.
“I’ve got all my clothes, paperwork and personal items.
“It could be as much as £5,000 but I’m living on Universal Credit and I’ve only got a small pension so can’t save a lot.
“It will take years for me to save up to get the stuff back.”
Diane sold her three-bed flat in Musselburgh, East Lothian, and took early retirement from her job as a customer service assistant with Edinburgh City Council to live permanently with her husband, who was 33 years her junior, in Colombo in 2015.
She spent £60,000 to build a house for them in the grounds of his parents’ home and more than £30,000 on a people carrier for Priyanjana to use as a taxi, as well as funding his family’s living costs.
In 2016 she began to suspected her husband was married to another women after finding paperwork and he would vanish for days on end, saying he was working for various companies.
The following year he was shot dead and Diane told the Daily Record at the time how she was left stranded in Sri Lanka, unable to recoup any of her savings and still expected to fund her new family with her pension.
Diane believes she was lucky to escape Sri Lanka alive after an armed man turned up looking for her at the hotel she was staying in just before flying back to Scotland.
She said: “This has left me very cautious of getting into another relationship. I thought Priyanjana loved me but obviously he didn’t. He just wanted to get money out of me.
“I think he thought once we got the house built and he married his younger wife, I would just get fed up and go back to Scotland and leave the house. But I had run out of money and couldn’t give him any more to get the house finished.
“I don’t think it’s safe for me to go back there. I haven’t spoken to my in laws. They’ve got the house I paid for. They live in it rent free.
“I feel like I’m not going to get anywhere pursuing the house anymore.
“The van I bought my husband was repossessed and in the hands of the police.”
In 2020, retired police officer David Swindle, who linked serial killer Peter Tobin to the murder of schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton, pledged to try and help Diane get her savings back.
But the case hit a brick wall because she has been unable to access vital documents left in Sri Lanka.
Diane’s belongings were initially in storage at the port in Colombo but when she ran out of money they were picked up by a friend and stored at a stranger’s home.
She has now launched a crowdfunder on Go Fund Me, in the hope she can be reunited with her possessions.
She said: “I’ve lost everything. I just want to raise enough money to try and get my stuff back so I’ve got something from my life before.”
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