British trekker left for dead tells of Himalayan attack

Martin Young, the British engineer left for dead by bandits who murdered his Spanish fiancee and her son while they were camping in the Himalayas, spoke for the first time yesterday about the ordeal.

Martin Young, the British engineer left for dead by bandits who murdered his Spanish fiancee and her son while they were camping in the Himalayas, spoke for the first time yesterday about the ordeal.

He told of his anguish and despair when he realised Maria Angeles Girones and her 14-year-old son Cristobal had been killed in the ambush.

Speaking from his hospital bed in the Indian capital New Delhi, Mr Young, 32, told the BBC: "God lent me an angel for a year. We matched each other perfectly. We were very close. We had some perfect times together. Now someone's just taken that away, so it's going to take a lot of adjusting."

They were attacked nine days ago as they slept in their tent in a remote part of Himachal Pradesh state in northern India.

Four men beat them with wooden clubs before throwing them into a gorge. They stole £340 worth of Indian rupees and US dollars as well as a camera, passports, clothing and the tent. Police are convinced the sole motive for the attack was robbery. They suspect local villagers of responsibility for carrying out the ambush.

Workers inspecting a local power project stumbled upon Mr Young, who had managed to clamber out of the gorge, and rescued him but Ms Girones and her son were already dead.

Mr Young recalled the attack yesterday, which left him with a broken jaw and ribs and covered in cuts and bruises. He said: "We were inside the tent. We were in sleeping bags and they were beating us from the outside with big sticks or big rods.

"If it had been one person we could have tried to form a defence but it was coming from several directions at once and they were targeting the top end of the body so there was nothing we could do."

Mr Young has spent five days recovering from surgery at the Indian capital's Apollo Hospital, where he arrived after a dramatic 12-hour, 225-mile journey by road from the site of the attack in the Parbati Valley.

The ambulance carrying him to New Delhi slid off the road at one point in the journey and careered into a tree and he had to wait hours for a second ambulance to arrive.

Mr Young, who comes from Hampshire and is a chartered civil engineer working for the engineering firm Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick, met Ms Girones, 34, during a diving trip in the Maldives a year ago. He had been working in New Delhi for the past eight months and the trek was a final trip for the trio before returning to the UK where he was due to be given another foreign posting.

The Parbati Valley is a popular trekking centre but has been nicknamed the Bermuda Triangle of India because at least a dozen foreign tourists have disappeared there in the past six years.

Last month, a German tourist was shot dead in the same region and his partner injured, prompting the Foreign Office to issue a warning to tourists to only trek there either in large groups or with a guide. Mr Young, Ms Girones and her son were camping on their own, without a guide.