The girlfriend of Australian hotel executive Jason Rigby has been formally described as a suspect by Fiji Police almost two years after his fatal stabbing was initially treated as suicide, marking a dramatic shift in one of the Pacific nation’s most closely scrutinised unexplained deaths.

Rigby, 40, was found critically injured in his staff apartment at the Crowne Plaza Fiji Nadi Bay Resort on the morning of December 14, 2024.

He had suffered a stab wound to the chest and could not be saved.

At the time, authorities publicly treated his death as a suicide and the resort said there was no criminal investigation.

Rigby’s Australian family never accepted that explanation.

Now Fiji Police Assistant Commissioner Loraini Seru has confirmed a significant change in the investigation, telling 60 Minutes that Rigby’s girlfriend, Shivani Siwan, is a suspect.

Asked directly whether Siwan held that status, Seru replied: “She is.”

No charge has been laid against Siwan.

There has been no judicial finding that she caused Rigby’s death, and being named a suspect does not establish criminal responsibility.

She is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Seru also confirmed that Ian Lovie, then an executive chef at the resort and a friend of Rigby, was in the apartment as Rigby was dying.

Lovie is not a suspect and is not accused of wrongdoing.

The development is especially striking because it represents a major departure from the position Fiji Police publicly adopted last year.

In June 2025, Assistant Commissioner Mesake Waqa said officers had completed their inquiry and had been unable to establish foul play.

Waqa rejected suggestions of a police cover-up and said the file had been handed to a Resident Magistrate with a recommendation for a full inquest.

Fijian media reported at the time that police regarded the investigation as complete.

The new assessment is markedly different.

Promotional material for a new 60 Minutes investigation says senior Fiji Police now regard Rigby’s death as suspicious and a likely murder case.

The renewed scrutiny follows almost two years of campaigning by Rigby’s family, who say basic questions about the scene, the weapon, post-mortem evidence and the circumstances immediately before his death have never been satisfactorily answered.

Rigby was from the Gold Coast and had moved to Fiji for what relatives described as a dream career opportunity.

He had helped establish the newly opened Crowne Plaza resort at Nadi Bay and was working as a senior executive, described in earlier reporting as the property’s executive assistant manager and second-in-command.

Family members said he enjoyed life in Fiji, spent his spare time surfing and playing golf and had been making plans for the future.

His brother Chris Rigby and sister-in-law Jess Rigby say they saw nothing in his behaviour that suggested he intended to take his own life.

“It definitely was not suicide,” Chris has said.

The family says Rigby had plans to travel to Japan and was also considering buying property in Australia.

Those observations do not by themselves disprove suicide.

But relatives say their suspicions were reinforced by what they later learned about the physical scene and the handling of the original investigation.

One of the central questions concerns the knife.

In its earlier reporting, 60 Minutes said the weapon recovered from the apartment was a large professional kitchen knife purchased in Nadi and was not known to belong to Rigby.

How it came to be inside his apartment, and who handled it before he was injured, have remained key unanswered questions publicly.

Accounts of exactly where the knife was found have also differed.

Some early reporting described Rigby as having been found with a knife in his hand.

Other accounts given to his family placed a bloodied knife on a nearby table.

No public court finding has resolved those discrepancies.

Another colleague, Arushi Arora, previously told 60 Minutes that she was called to the apartment and found Rigby still alive and in obvious distress.

According to that account, Siwan and Lovie were already present.

Arora said she saw a large bloodied knife nearby.

She was among the people who sought emergency medical assistance.

Earlier reporting said Siwan had told others that Rigby had taken his own life.

That explanation quickly became the dominant account of the death.

Rigby’s family, however, began pursuing their own investigation after becoming dissatisfied with the information they were receiving.

They hired a private investigator and retained a lawyer in Fiji.

The family also began recovering and reviewing large amounts of digital material associated with Rigby, including messages and cloud-based data, in an attempt to reconstruct his final days and relationships.

That privately gathered material was later presented to Fiji Police.

During an earlier visit to Fiji involving the family and 60 Minutes, investigators reportedly told relatives the matter was being examined as a suspected homicide.

That apparent reopening sat uneasily with the public statement later issued by Waqa saying no foul play had been established.

Seru’s latest comments appear to move the official position again — this time towards the family’s longstanding contention that the death requires investigation as a possible killing.

The change does not mean police have solved the case.

Investigators still need evidence capable of establishing what happened inside the apartment, whether Rigby’s wound was self-inflicted or caused by another person and, if another person was involved, whether any criminal offence occurred.

The evidentiary standard required to charge and prosecute someone is considerably higher than the threshold for treating a person as a suspect.

The family has also raised concerns about forensic and post-mortem information.

Two examinations were conducted after Rigby’s death: one in Fiji and another after his body was repatriated to Queensland.

Relatives say they have not been permitted to see the full reports.

They have also complained about delays involving access to information stored on one of Rigby’s phones and about the difficulty of coordinating investigative work across Fiji and Australia.

Jess Rigby has said neither Fiji Police nor Australian police agencies have kept the family directly informed to the extent they expected.

Those are allegations from the family and do not, by themselves, establish misconduct by any agency.

Cross-border death investigations can be complex because evidence, witnesses and legal authority may be spread across several jurisdictions.

Fiji Police remain the agency responsible for determining whether a criminal offence occurred in Fiji.

Australian authorities can provide assistance when requested but do not automatically take control of an overseas homicide investigation involving an Australian citizen.

One issue that has attracted expert attention is the method of death itself.

Forensic pathologist Professor Roger Byard told 60 Minutes in earlier coverage that suicide by stabbing is uncommon and that such deaths should be thoroughly investigated to exclude homicide.

That observation does not prove Rigby was murdered.

It does underline why forensic examination of the wound, weapon, scene and surrounding circumstances is particularly important.

Rigby’s family has spent much of the period since his death attempting to generate precisely that level of scrutiny.

Chris and Jess established Justice for Jason Rigby social media pages to publicise the case and seek information from people who were at the resort in December 2024.

Jess has also discussed the case on true-crime podcasts and is preparing a book about the family’s experience, scheduled for publication later this year.

The campaign has repeatedly asked former resort workers and guests who may know something about the morning of Rigby’s death to come forward.

Family members believe continued public attention helped prevent the case from disappearing after the initial suicide conclusion.

“We’ve been working with our private investigator and our lawyer in Fiji, but I think over time it’s stalled quite a lot and you get quite frustrated with the process,” Jess said.

She said the family believed its persistence, combined with media attention, had helped produce the latest movement in the case.

The family’s determination has also drawn attention to the unusual history of the police investigation.

In the days after Rigby died, authorities publicly indicated there was no criminal inquiry.

By March 2025, the file had been referred to a magistrate with a recommendation for an inquest.

In June that year, senior police publicly said they had found no foul play.

Yet family members were simultaneously being told the death was receiving further criminal scrutiny.

Now, in September 2026, a senior police officer has gone further and expressly identified a suspect.

That sequence creates obvious questions about what new evidence has emerged, what changed in the police assessment and whether investigators now reject the original suicide theory altogether.

Those questions have not yet been fully answered publicly.

There is also no publicly available inquest finding that definitively determines Rigby’s cause and manner of death.

That makes the latest police statements important but not conclusive.

A suspicious death investigation can end without charges if evidence is insufficient.

Conversely, investigators can change direction when fresh witness accounts, forensic material or digital evidence alter their understanding of an old case.

The naming of Siwan as a suspect therefore represents a major investigative development, but it should not be interpreted as a finding of guilt.

The same principle applies to anyone else who was present at the resort or apartment that morning.

Lovie’s presence has been publicly confirmed, but police say he is not a suspect and no wrongdoing is alleged against him.

The investigation now appears to have returned to a question Rigby’s family has been asking since December 2024: what happened in the brief period between the time he was seen at work that morning and the moment he was found fatally wounded inside his apartment?

For Chris and Jess, the latest police acknowledgement offers something they say has often been missing from the case — official recognition that the circumstances deserve deeper scrutiny.

It does not yet provide the answer they want.

Almost two years after Jason Rigby died, no one has been charged, no public inquest finding has resolved the case and police have not publicly disclosed the evidence that caused them to identify a suspect.

But the case is no longer where it began.

A death once publicly treated as suicide is now being described by senior Fiji Police as suspicious.

For a family that has spent nearly two years refusing to accept the original explanation, that change is significant — even as the most important question remains unanswered.

Who, if anyone, caused Jason Rigby’s death is still to be established.