Thaindian News

Mount Abu (Rajasthan), Feb 14 (IANS) The police in this hill resort in Rajasthan Thursday launched an investigation into the murder of an Israeli tourist whose body was found in a jungle. The police suspect that Stephen Nick, 35, was killed with a sharp weapon after he was robbed.

The manager of the hotel Lake Cottage had filed a report with the Mount Abu police station stating that Nick had checked in Tuesday and went for sightseeing in the afternoon but he did not return.

“After the report was filed we started searching for the tourist. We found his body in a forest following the information given by a Ramkund temple priest who had seen him going to the Valley’s Walk area,” Chain Singh Rajpurohit, a police official, told IANS.

He was hit on his head by a sharp weapon and the camera he had been carrying was missing.

“We have launched investigations into the matter,” the police official said, adding a few people were interrogated in this connection.

The desert state of Rajasthan, India’s top tourist destination, has witnessed several cases of molestation and rape of foreign visitors, forcing authorities to take extra security measures.

An auto-rickshaw driver and his accomplice raped a 47-year-old German tourist in Jodhpur in 2005. The two were sentenced to life imprisonment.

B.H. Mohanty, the son of a senior police officer from Orissa, had raped a 26-year-old German in Alwar in March 2006. He was sentenced to seven years in jail, but jumped parole in December 2006 and has been absconding since then.

A Japanese woman was raped and robbed by the son of a hotel manager in the Hindu holy town of Pushkar in April 2006, along with three other men. A fast-track court sentenced Babloo, the main accused, to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment.

This January an American tourist complained of being molested in Pushkar. A 40-year-old British journalist alleged that the owner of a guesthouse in Udaipur raped her on Dec 23 last year.