Fines paid, four Kinabalu nudists leave Sabah

Embassies arrange flights out for Briton, Canadian sisters and Dutchman.

KOTA KINABALU: Four tourists who posed naked for photographs on the summit of Mount Kinabalu have left Sabah a day after being fined and sentenced to three days’ jail.

Six remaining climbers in the party are being sought by police. They had not registered with their proper names with Sabah Parks before going up the mountain, a news report said.

The four who left were Canadian sisters Lindsey and Danielle Petersen, Eleanor Grace Hawkins of Britain, and Dutchman Dylan Thomas Snel. They had pleaded guilty in the sessions court here to committing an obscene act in a public place.

Their fines of RM5,000 each were paid by a lawyer on their behalf, and embassy officials arranged for their flights home, The Star reported.

Their three-day jail term had been ordered to run from June 9, when they were arrested. The judge said they had shown remorse for their actions.

Eleanor’s father Timothy Hawkins was quoted by the BBC as saying the sentence was “appropriate and fair” but it appeared that Eleanor had been “treated pretty badly” amid the media scrum outside court.

“Eleanor knows what she did was wrong and disrespectful and she is deeply sorry for any offence she has caused to the Malaysian people.”

Photographs of the group were widely circulated online, and caused an uproar in the Kadazandusun community in Sabah, for whom Mount Kinabalu is sacred and believed to be the home of ancestral spirits.

Some community leaders felt that the actions of the tourists had been the cause of the magnitude 5.9 earthquake which struck the Ranau region around Mount Kinabalu, causing the deaths of 14 climbers, among them schoolchildren from Singapore, and four mountain guides.