Michael Owen

Shillong, Aug. 26: When newspapers in Meghalaya first reported that English soccer star Michael Owen had a Khasi half-sister, 30-year-old Michelle Syiemlieh from Mawkyrwat probably didn’t expect her new-found fame to fizzle out like England’s World Cup campaign.

It now appears that worse is in store for her. Police are contemplating a case against those who concocted the story that Owen was born to Michelle’s Khasi mother Merian after she married an Englishman and shifted to England sometime in the 1970s.

Though it has yet to be ascertained if Michelle started the rumour, she is certainly one of the suspects. Sources said the special branch had interrogated Michelle and registered a general diary. “Whoever is found guilty of starting the rumour will be charged under Section 420 of the IPC,” a police official said.

The claims about Owen’s antecedents, made after the World Cup got under way in Japan and Korea nearly three months ago, were widely reported in the local press and caught the imagination of the soccer-mad public. Mawkyrwat turned into a tourist destination as people made a beeline for the Syiemliehs’ residence in the hope of getting a glimpse of Michelle.

Such was the hysteria that police were forced to build an “invisible security ring” around “Owen’s relatives”, lest militant outfits bring them to harm, home department sources said. It later transpired that the England and Liverpool forward’s biological parents was of authentic English stock, being born to true-blue Britons Terry and Janette. Sio Siemylieh, one of Michelle’s aunts, said her niece did have a half-brother in England, but his father was an engineer called Stephen and not Terry.

It is not clear whether Michelle had voluntarily told reporters that Owen was her half-brother. Police officials said it was difficult to ascertain if she was the source of the rumour or whether anybody else had concocted the story and she was a party to it.

Incidentally, Michelle’s “real half-brother Johnny” had visited Mawkyrwat in 1989 along with Merian.