Mexican police search for Israeli tourist missing near Cancun

Apr 27, 2007, 16:31 GMT

Cancun, Mexico - Police were searching Friday for an Israeli tourist who disappeared last month near the eastern Mexican resort town of Cancun.

The Israeli consul in Mexico, Itzjak Erez, is cooperating in the search for the 25-year-old woman, identified as Dana Rishpy, who had arrived in the Latin American country four days before she went missing on March 31.

Over her first few days in Mexico, Rishpy visited Isla Mujeres and Playa del Carmen, on the Caribbean. On March 31 she moved on to the town of Tulum, near Cancun, where she was last seen at the nightclub of the Hotel Mezanine.

Erez said that, in Rishpy's last e-mail message to her family, she mentioned that she had met a German tourist.

Some 30 police officers combed the area near the Mayan ruins in Tulum on Thursday. Police sources admitted that they are worried because Rishpy's belongings, including all her travel documents, were found in her hotel.

Several foreign tourists have been murdered or died in accidents near the resort of Cancun.

Last year, a Canadian couple was brutally murdered in their room at the hotel Barcelo Maya de Playa del Carmen, in a case which has not yet been solved. Authorities suspect that people who travelled with them were in involved in the crime.

Months earlier, the dead bodies of a Spanish woman and an Italian man were found near the Tulum archeological site. The woman had been raped, and two Mexican young men were arrested in connection with the case.