Service at Ely Cathedral to celebrate girls' lives

A church service to be held tomorrow for the schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman will be a final public "celebration" of their lives by the community they came from, a clergyman said yesterday.

More than 2,000 people from Soham, including teachers, friends and neighbours of the girls as well as officers involved in the murder investigation, have been invited to the ceremony in nearby Ely Cathedral.

A fleet of buses have been laid on to drive mourners the five miles to the 12th-century cathedral from the small Cambridgeshire town where Holly and Jessica disappeared on 4 August.

Plans for the 5pm service, which will be attended by the girls' families, were announced as detectives said they were still waiting to establish the cause of the death of the two 10-year-olds.

They have been released ahead of private funerals expected to take place next week but toxicology tests will take "some time" to generate results, police said.

Clergy involved in organising the invitation-only church service said Jessica's and Holly's parents had been closely involved in deciding its format and tone. Among those who will read poems and texts at the ceremony will be one of the police liaison officers who have been with the families since the girls vanished.

Canon John Inge, the vice- dean of Ely Cathedral, said: "It will not be a memorial. It will be a service of celebration and remembrance for Holly and Jessica and that is very much what their parents wanted. It will an opportunity for them to celebrate their lives. I hope it will provide some light despite the darkness."

Police and church officials have appealed for the public not to try to attend the service or congregate outside the cathedral, asking instead that they watch on television. The cathedral was chosen to host the ceremony because Soham's Anglican church, St Andrew's, was too small to accommodate the numbers that were expected.

Tickets have been issued only to those whom the Chapman and Wells families wanted to attend. As well as friends, understood to include classmates of Holly and Jessica, staff from St Andrew's Primary School, where Holly and Jessica were pupils, have been invited, as well as other community groups and senior Cambridgeshire police detectives.

The Reverend Tim Alban Jones, vicar at St Andrew's, said: "I think this is the landmark in the grieving process for the town of Soham."

The service will be the last public ceremony of remembrance before Holly is buried and Jessica is cremated at separate funerals, which their families want to keep completely private.