Thai police offer reward for missing British tourist

BANGKOK: — Thai police Saturday offered a reward for any sighting - dead or alive - of a British law student who went missing while white-water rafting near the holiday island of Phuket.

The search for the student Shenaz Kapoor, 22, from Dundee, Scotland, started when she fell in the fast-running water Tuesday at a popular rafting spot, but has been hampered by bad weather.

The local authorities attempted without much success use a local dam to reduce the water flow so that a thorough search of the river might be possible.

Kapoor is the second foreign national to have been lost while white-water rafting in Thailand within a week. The body of a Canadian woman was recovered from the Pai River in the north last Monday.

Kapoor had used part of her year off to work with Tsunami orphans in southern Thailand and was due to start the final year of a law degree at Dundee University in September. The incident happened in the Ton Parawat national park at Pha Ngan.

A local police spokesman told Thai radio that a 20,000-baht (500 dollars) reward had been offered to encourage local people to keep their eyes open because it was important to the family that they know without doubt the fate of the young woman.

Her grandfather, Ibrahim Okhai, is the head of the prominent Okhai business family in Dundee. She was a leading figure in her university’s Islamic Society.

Okhai told the local Herald newspaper that the family had not given up hope: ‘We gave her some spending money for the trip but she only used a fraction of it and gave the rest away. That’s the type of person she is.’

Robin White, her university course adviser, told the Scotsman that ‘Shenaz was not only a gifted student, she was also a very popular figure within the school, and she will be sadly missed by us all at the university.’

–DPA 2006-08-19

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