Tiffany jewellery owner dies after falling from cruise ship at 3am

The owner of Tiffany's jewellery in Turkey appears to have died after falling from a cruise ship at 3:00am.

71-year-old Dilek Ertek is believed to have died after falling into the sea off the coast of Tahiti on 26 October.

She had run the prestigious Tiffany's jewellery operations in Turkey for almost 30 years, opening up Turkey's first Tiffany & Co in Istanbul in 1995.

Ertek was on the Norwegian Spirit cruise ship, having boarded it on 24 October with the intention of celebrating her 72nd birthday on the small Pacific island of Bora Bora on 5 November, the cruise would then have come to an end in Hawaii.

However, two days into the voyage she went missing and is now believed to be dead.

Security footage from the ship shows an unknown figure falling overboard at about 3:00am on 26 October whom the authorities believe to be Ertek.

Newsflash

A search for her body was organised but they were unable to find her, efforts to locate her have now been brought to an end.

Her son, Gökçe Atuk, claims some very valuable jewellery has disappeared from his mother's cabin.

He went to Tahiti to try and help with the search efforts for his mother and has since launched legal challenges.

A 74-year-old man was kept under observation by cruise ship staff in a separate cabin for the next three days until the vessel docked in Tahiti.

The man was questioned by police in Tahiti before being released due to a lack of evidence and has since returned to his native Switzerland.

Newsflash

Turkish media has said that Ertek's friends and family do not believe her death was a suicide as they believed she had a 'happy and peaceful' life.

Experts are unsure how the 71-year-old, only just over five feet tall and a teetotaller, was able to fall over the three foot high guard rail on the side of the ship and plummet into the ocean.

Captain Mustafa Can said it would have been 'difficult to fall from this type of passenger and cruise ship'.

Born in Istanbul, Ertek graduated from the department of architecture at Mimar Sinan University before going on to study diamonds at the Gemological Institute of America in New York.