内容摘要：Charlotte and Poppy, and dozens more parents here, even thousands across the country, are just at the beginning of processing the events of Monday afternoon. It is already on Charlotte’s mind how the community will come together to do “something special” for when the children return to school in September.

Charlotte and Poppy, and dozens more parents here, even thousands across the country, are just at the beginning of processing the events of Monday afternoon. It is already on Charlotte’s mind how the community will come together to do “something special” for when the children return to school in September.

Perhaps most significantly, there was lingering doubt over whether frail, arthritic Griff, who used a stick around the farm, suffered with curvature of the spine and had "clawlike" hands affecting his dexterity, would have been physically capable of doing what he was accused of."Sitting next to Griff in chapel, he often wouldn't be able to find the page in the hymnbook, because of his hands [so] I'd help him," said Mr Absalom.

"One time he dropped his glasses and couldn't grasp them to pick them up."The way she was killed, she was bludgeoned beyond recognition, there's no way he could have done that, physically or mentally. Looking through the evidence, it just doesn't add up."In his report, Det Ch Supt Molloy dismissed the likelihood of a third party killing the siblings as "so remote as to be discounted".

But he acknowledged too that there was nothing in their backgrounds to make sense of such an act of violence.Many believe that Griff disturbed an intruder attacking Patti when he arrived home from the shop - possibly someone they knew demanding money from them.

They were known to be comfortably off - more than £2,000 in cash was found in the farmhouse after their deaths and they left £35,000 in savings and investments.

On 17 February 1977, a jury inquest in Haverfordwest returned verdicts of unlawful killing for Patti Thomas, and an open verdict on Griff.The uncertainty is amplified by the change in asylum policy in Europe.

Still, this is a young woman whose experience of life - the experience of serious disability since birth, witnessing the terrors of war, travelling across the Middle East and Europe to safety - has created a capacity for hope.In the near decade that I have known her, it is undimmed. The fall of Assad has only deepened her faith in Syria and its people.

"There are many people who are waiting to see Syria fall into some kind of an abyss," she says."We are not people who hate or envy or want to want to eliminate each other. We are people who were raised to be afraid of each other. But our default setting is that we love and accept who we are."