A vigil was held in Ballymena on Wednesday evening as Polish representatives in Northern Ireland spoke of their shock and sadness following the suspected double murder and suicide in the Co Antrim town.The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has continued to seek public assistance in establishing the full circumstances behind the deaths of a 41-year-old man, his wife (39) and of their eight-year-old daughter. The adults are believed to have originally been from Poland. The incident was being investigated as a double murder and sudden death, police have said.Prayers were said for the family at All Saints Catholic Church in Ballymena on Wednesday morning while a vigil was held at the Braid Arts Centre on Wednesday evening.Dorothy Zdanuczyk of Cooltura, the Polish Community Centre in Belfast, said it was particularly distressing that it seemed the family was not in a position to reach out for support before the violent incident.Zdanuczyk, who lives in Newtownabby on the outskirts of north Belfast, said she had contacted Polish friends in Ballymena but that they did not know any details about how and why the tragedy occurred.All they could relate, she said, was that the three people who were killed seemed on the face of it to be “a normal and quiet family” who were not particularly well known to the Polish community in Ballymena.“It is really sad. Maybe if they had any problem why did they not ask us for help?” she added.“There are 23,000 Polish people in Northern Ireland and we try to help everyone who calls to us who have any problems,” she said, adding that the centre provides therapy and many other services.Zdanuczyk said the Cooltura centre would be happy to offer assistance to relatives of the family or others affected by the killings. “If someone who is connected to the family needs emotional support or guidance we can help them,” she said.Jerome Mullen, the Newry-based Polish honorary consul in the North, said the killings were a “terrible tragedy and the worst I have ever experienced in my 18 years as honorary consul.”Mullen had acted in the past in a number of cases, including where Polish families were subjected to racist incidents, but this was the “worst tragedy” involving the Polish community that he had encountered.At its height there were some 45,000 Poles in Northern Ireland, he said, but due to Brexit, Covid and the improved economy in Poland that number had fallen to the mid-20,000s. Similar to Zdanuczyk, he said the family was not widely known among fellow Poles and that he had had no dealings with them. He explained that Poles now were “well settled” in Northern Ireland and some families were happy to act “independently” from the general Polish community.“They may well have been living on their own and not connected to too many people,” he added.Mullen said he was waiting to hear from the police when the bodies will be released and thereafter decisions would be taken as to where the funerals would take place, in Poland or Northern Ireland.As postmortems were taking place on Wednesday, police and the Polish consulate in Northern Ireland were making efforts to contact the relatives of the family in Poland and in the North. The names of the family were not being released until relatives were notified.While detectives from the PSNI’s major investigation team have begun a murder investigation police are not looking for anyone else in connection with the killings. The house at Cullybackey Road in Ballymena where the three were found dead on Monday morning remained cordoned off by police. Flowers and soft toys and notes of condolence were left at the scene. The eight-year-old girl attended primary school in Ballymena. Women’s Aid said the mother of the child was the 31st woman to be murdered in Northern Ireland since 2020.