The brother of missing British teenager Ms Ellie James has told of the last moments before she vanished on a treacherous mountain trek, as hopes grew that she could be alive.
Ms James (17) disappeared during the family trek on Mount Kinabalu, Borneo, on Thursday but hopes were growing that she could be found alive after rescuers found signs of her on the hillside.
District police chief Mr Zulbaharin Ismail said rescuers believed Ms James was still alive but "very weak" and lost in a four-mile area near the foot of the mountain.
Tracks were spotted in a forest area, more than a mile away from the main path, between 5,000 and 6,000 feet up the mountain and the officer said Ms James had tied plastic bags to trees and cleared space to sleep.
Specialist searches on the 13,455 feet-high mountain were due to continue tomorrow, with a 70-strong specialist team from Kuala Lumpur flown in to search the area.
Medical student Ms Kirsty Melhuish (21) said Ms James's brother Mr Henry James (15) had told her he and his sister were separated while descending the mountain, the tallest in south east Asia. Mr James said he and his sister had climbed ahead of their parents and guide, reached the summit and passed their parents again on the descent.
"The visibility was about three metres and it was just after dawn, so it was still half-light, and it's a very steep incline," Ms Melhuish said. They lost the guide rope somehow and sat together for four hours, just freezing, and it was the boy's idea to get vegetation around them to protect them from the wind.
"But Ellie thought she could make it across the granite slab into the cloud. Her brother followed her but he lost sight of her and she could not hear him shouting because of the cross-winds."
Ms Melhuish said wind speeds had reached 64 mph that night, with temperatures falling.
Park wardens said tropical storms had seen winds reaching 70 mph and temperatures as low as 8C (46F).
Ms James was last seen heading towards the notorious Low's Gully, a 10-mile-long gully lined with boulder-filled chasms, sheer cliff-falls and waterfalls, Ms Melhuish said.
It was the site of an SAS search in 1994 after an Army team went missing for a month and had to be rescued.