A FATHER has spoken for the first time of the pain of losing his wife six years after his son was killed following a single punch while on holiday in Spain.

Antoinette Mallon died three months ago following a short illness at the age of just 48, not knowing who killed her son Craig.

Craig, 26, had travelled to Lloret de Mar for his brother Brian’s stag weekend in May 2012. Within hours of arriving, the quantity surveyor died after a blow to the head.

BBC Scotland is now set to screen a documentary in which retired detective David Swindle – the brains behind Operation Anagram, which helped catch Scottish serial killer Peter Tobin – investigates the deaths of Craig, and West Lothian woman Kirsty Maxwell, to question why Spanish police have still not been able to identify Craig’s killer.

Ian Mallon described the toll his son and wife’s death has had on his life. He also remembered the last moments with his son as he desperately continues to search for answers on his death.

The 54-year-old said: “Craig had come home on the Thursday afternoon. He went to bed, was up on Friday, had breakfast and left at lunchtime for Edinburgh Airport.

“He called me when he arrived at Lloret de Mar that night and said, ‘Everything is fine. The flight was good. We’re heading to the hotel now’. I said to Brian, ‘Look after him’. Brian said, ‘Dad, stop worrying.

Everything will be okay’. That was the last I heard from Craig.”

The family learned Craig had been killed after someone “ran past him and punched him in the face”. The family then travelled to Spain.

Before leaving for home, he said he spoke to the Spanish police officer in charge and asked him how confident he was of making an arrest.

Mr Mallon said: “He said, ‘Very confident’. I feel that was just to get me out the country, away from Lloret de Mar, to stop affecting tourism...

“Craig isn’t the first fatality. There have been an awful lot of other working-class families in similar cases who just can’t afford to keep flying over. You can’t survive like that. God forgive me, but this won’t be the last death. I just hope the Maxwells won’t be sitting five years down the line like me with no answers. Life in our home changed that day Craig died. The atmosphere, everything changed. And it was never the same again.”

He added: “I don’t know if we’d ever get justice in terms of a conviction, but Antoinette just wanted closure for her son. They’re both gone now. She’ll know now who did it and what happened. But she went to her death after six years of fighting and fighting and getting nowhere. That’s incredible, that.”

In April 2017, 27-year-old Kirsty Maxwell, from Livingston, arrived in Benidorm for her friend’s hen party.

Late in the night, Kirsty ended up in a room full of strangers – five men from Nottingham – where she fell from the window of their 10th-floor room. Her family, too, are the focus of the documentary as they continue to travel to the holiday resort to piece together what happened.

Killed Abroad, BBC1, Wednesday, 9pm.