Abducted backpacker saved by petrol ‘stunt’
Man charged after Briton used petrol station stop in ‘brilliant cry for help’ to end weeks of alleged abuse
A young British backpacker who endured a five-week kidnap ordeal in Australia engineered a “brilliant cry for help” when she left a petrol station without paying, forcing the cashier to call the police, it has emerged. The 22-year-old, found with black eyes and bruises, suffered repeated rape and abuse at the hands of an obsessive boyfriend on a 900-mile outback road trip before being rescued by police on Sunday.
A YOUNG British backpacker who endured a five-week kidnap ordeal in Australia engineered a “brilliant cry for help” when she left a petrol station without paying, forcing the cashier to call the police.
The 22-year-old woman was allegedly raped and beaten repeatedly by an obsessive boyfriend during a 900-mile road trip across the Outback before her dramatic rescue by police three days ago.
The woman’s friends believe her failure to pay for fuel on Sunday was a deliberate “stunt” to engineer an escape.
She was shaking and had black eyes and bruises when she entered the garage’s shop in the isolated town of Mitchell, Queensland, according to the woman working behind the counter.
She said she could not pay for the petrol because her “ex-boyfriend” had her purse, and the cashier reportedly told her if she could not arrange for payment to be made, she would have to call the police.
At that stage, the woman walked out of the petrol station and drove off, prompting the cashier to call police who later intercepted the car.
When they searched it, officers found the woman’s alleged abductor buried under clothes in a rear alcove. She has since been in contact with family back in the UK, who had issued an appeal last month via Facebook to her friends in Australia after she reportedly “fell off the radar”.
One 27-year-old friend told the Daily Mail Austral- ia website he believed the “stunt” was a “brilliant cry for help”.
After her escape, the young woman is to attend a Brisbane hospital today to receive further treatment before she is reunited with her family, some of whom are expected to travel to Australia in the coming days.
The alleged kidnapper is understood to have destroyed the backpacker’s passport, forcing her to remain in Australia until she could obtain a new one.
Beverley Page, the owner of the Caltex service station in Mitchell, said she suspected something was wrong from the woman’s distressed state and that regardless of the non-payment for fuel she alerted police.
“She came in and she couldn’t pay for her fuel,” said Ms Page. She was crying and shaking the whole time – she was really upset. There were two marks on her neck along with the black eyes.” When Ms Page offered to ring the police, the woman left, returned to her vehicle and drove off. Ms Page followed in her car and reported the incident to a police vehicle parked up the street. When officers stopped the Mitsubishi Pajero, they found the distraught woman at the wheel and a 22year-old man hiding in a specially constructed compartment in the rear. It emerged the woman had been kidnapped and allegedly subjected to prolonged abuse. The pair had started a relationship after they met at a trance music festival, known in Australia as a “bush doof ”, outside Cairns, on Jan 27. The man, originally from New South Wales, has now been charged with a string of offences, including four counts of rape, eight counts of assault, four counts of strangulation, and deprivation of liberty.
The woman, who has been in Australia on a working visa since April 2015, told officers that he had begun abusing her shortly after they met.
At one stage he allegedly gagged her with a towel in the hotel room and left her so terrified that she was too afraid to attempt to escape or seek help.
After leaving Cairns last week, the pair travelled more than 900 miles across the east of Australia, stopping at towns including Bowen and Gordonsvale in Queensland.
The woman told police she was forced to do most of the driving while her abuser hid in the back to avoid being detected. The attacks on her continued through the journey until they were forced to stop for fuel on Sunday.
Officers stopped the car on the Warrego Highway and found the woman badly cut and bruised, before discovering the man hiding under clothes in the alcove at back of the four-wheel drive.
Det Insp Paul Hart said the British backpacker had shown remarkable courage in being able to provide a detailed account of her ordeal.
He said: “What she’s experienced is no doubt horrific and terrifying. It has taken great courage for our victim to provide the detail she has. I’m sure we can all appreciate that the charges speak for themselves in terms of what she’s had to endure.”
He said the woman would have had few opportunities to escape. “She is a tourist, a lot of the areas where she would have been would have been unknown to her, and she wouldn’t have known anyone there. So it would have been difficult for her to make an escape,” he said. “From the information we’ve been provided with she had very limited opportunity to try to do that anyway.”
A friend of the woman said the alleged kidnapper had become obsessed with her and changed his Facebook profile to “married” shortly after meeting her.
The friend said: “He was really clingy. It was like he just blew in to town and then latched on to the first single girl,” he claimed.
A spokesman for the British High Commission said: “We are supporting a British woman following an incident in Queensland and remain in contact with local authorities.”
‘He was really clingy. It was like he just blew in to town and then latched on to the first single girl’