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Incidents of tourists missing in Nepal increasing
Sudeshna Sarkar, Indo-Asian News Service

Kathmandu, Oct 23 (IANS) Nepal's reputation as a safe destination for tourists has come under a cloud with two European women vanishing without a trace in just over a month.

Sabine Grueneklee, a 31-year-old German tourist from Munich, is the latest to disappear from Kathmandu. Her family members are frantically seeking information about her whereabouts.

Grueneklee, who was staying in Hotel Horizon here from Oct 7, checked out a week late, apparently to go trekking to the Everest base camp. 

The local media quoted another tourist, identified only as Peter, as saying that she had promised to meet him at the airport in Kathmandu but never turned up.

According to her family, Grueneklee attended a yoga course in Kathmandu where she met two persons, Jush and Barbara, whom she had got to know in Tibet.

The Munich resident's disappearance hit the headlines the same time the German envoy to Nepal was quoted as saying that Nepal was a safe destination despite the Maoist insurgency.

"German tourists could visit each and every part of the country without any fear," ambassador Franz Ring was reported as saying in a Nepal Tourism Board newsletter published Saturday.

The statement came during a food festival in Pokhara city, west of Kathmandu, three days after Grueneklee went missing. 

The German woman's disappearance comes close on the heels of a French schoolteacher vanishing from the outskirts of the capital under mysterious circumstances. She was later killed.

Celine Henry, 33, went missing Sep 3. She was last seen in the Nagarjun jungle area, west of Kathmandu. Her luggage is still lying unclaimed in the Pilgrim's Guest House in the capital.

The suspicion of foul play was raised when the police found some cloths and blood stains in the jungle where Henry's body was found. 

And in July this year, Trevor Stokol, a 25-year-old American, went missing while trekking near the Everest base camp. At least six more tourists have reportedly vanished from Nepal since 2003.

The missing tourists include - Alex James Ratnasothy, a 24-year-old British backpacker; Tiziana Pellegatta, a 35-year-old Italian-born British national; Briton Gareth David Koch; Franck Veismann, a French tourist; Naama Richker, an Israeli high-school graduate; and Jack Chan, a trekker from Hong Kong.