Here are some more details on this tragic story:
Missing teenager found dead on mountain
John Aglionby and Jamie Wilson
Guardian
Thursday August 23, 2001
After an agonising six-day wait, the parents of Ellie James, the teenager missing on the inhospitable slopes of south-east Asia's highest mountain, Mount Kinabalu, had their worst fears realised yesterday when her body was found by a park ranger.
On Tuesday the couple's hopes were raised when a search party discovered recent footprints, banana skins, a makeshift shelter and a plastic bag tied round a tree branch - signs that their 17-year-old daughter might still be alive.
But yesterday morning, as Bruce, 54, and Claire, 49, pre pared to give a press conference criticising the search operation by the Malaysian authorities, officials broke the news they had been dreading.
Ellie was found lying face down in a steep-sided gully more than 3,600 metres up the 4,101 metre (13,455ft) mountain in Sabah state, on the northern tip of Borneo island.
It was only about 500 metres from where rescuers found her brother, Henry, 15, a few hours after their parents raised the alarm after realising the two children were not ahead of them when they reached the bottom of the mountain last Thursday morning.
Yesterday the family paid tribute to their "brave, intelli gent and beautiful" daughter. "Ellie was a remarkable girl. She lived her life to the full and achieved more in her 17 years than most people do in 75," they said in a statement.
The local police chief, Assistant Superintendent Zul Baharin Ismail, described it as a very unfortunate and tragic accident. "We were racing against time and were badly hampered by bad weather."
Ellie is only the fourth person in 30 years to have died on a mountain that tens of thousands of people conquer every year. Locals, however, revere the peak and call it "the abode of the dead".
Guides have described the conditions on Mt Kinabalu as among the worst in a decade. The mountain was shrouded in mist and battered by strong winds and rain for much of the time Ellie was missing, with the temperature often dropping below freezing at high altitude.
Hours before Ellie's body was found her brother had been describing to police their last terrifying moments together. The pair had become separated from a party of 15 trekkers while climbing the mountain as a climax to a 14-day adventure holiday. They had reached the summit ahead of their parents and passed them on the descent, but disaster struck when they lost the guide rope they had been using to navigate down.
The pair spent four hours huddled together, wrapping themselves in vegetation to try to escape the fierce cold before Ellie decided they should press on. But with visibility down to about three metres Henry lost sight of his sister as she walked ahead of him.
Scared and alone and unable to call her back because his voice was lost in the wind he decided to turn back. Rescuers found him that evening "blue-lipped with hypothermia" and carried him down to base camp.
Supt Ismail said it was too early to determine the cause or time of Ellie's death. "The body is still being carried down the mountain and there will have to be a postmortem," he said. However, there did not appear to be any noticeable injuries, suggesting that Ellie might have died of exposure rather than a fall.
The body was expected to be brought off the mountain late last night but the weather was deteriorating and Supt Ismail said the rangers might wait overnight at a hut to complete the descent in daylight.
The footprints and shelter that made rescuers believe Ellie might still have been alive were discovered thousands of feet lower down the mountain from St John's Peak, where her body was found.
It is not clear whether Ellie first went down the mountain and then tried to retrace her steps to where she had left Henry, or if someone else made the shelter.
"We were lucky," Supt Ismail said. "We went back today around that area because the weather had cleared and spotted the body."
Supt Ismail denied accusations that the search mission had been poorly managed or too small. "There were at least 70 experienced climbers looking for her by yesterday, including people flown in from Kuala Lumpur. We were doing everything we could."
But Kirsty Melhuish, 21, a medical student who had passed Henry on her way down after abandoning her own climb because she and a friend could not see or hear or feel their fingers in the intense cold, criticised the guiding system. She said guides were inexperienced and ill equipped, and would leave clients for long periods during the climb.
"I was really scared. Visibility was about three metres and it's very steep. You were literally hanging off the guide rope because the wind was so strong," she said.
Travelbag Adventures, the company which organised the trip, announced an investigation into why the teenager went missing.
Eighteen British soldiers disappeared for more than four weeks in the treacherous Low's Gully in 1994. They all made it out alive and their ordeal was made into a film.
