Missing backpacker: police dismiss ‘insurance scam’ claims

Australian police today dismissed claims that the disappearance and suspected murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio was an insurance scam.

A police spokeswoman said the claims, reported in the Daily Mail last week, that Mr Falconio had faked his own disappearance to claim insurance money were similar to allegations made in an anonymous letter sent to police in February.

‘‘We have found nothing to suggest that it was a fraudulent act or an insurance scam,’’ said Denise Hurley of the Northern Territory Police.

Hurley said Northern Territory Police assistant commissioner Michael Daulby had discussed the matter with Mr Falconio’s family, and assured them detectives were still hunting for a man believed to have killed their son.

Mr Falconio, 28, of Hepworth, near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and girlfriend Joanne Lees, 27, of Almondbury, West Yorks, were tricked into stopping their Volkswagen camper van just outside Barrow Creek, a remote township 190 miles north of the central city of Alice Springs, and then attacked on July 14 last year.

Miss Lees told police that Mr Falconio stepped out of their van and she heard a shot. The gunman then bound and gagged her and forced her into the back of his four-wheel drive pick-up. She managed to free herself and escape to raise the alarm, sparking one of the biggest manhunts in Australian history.

‘‘We are confident that the story, as Joanne told us, is what happened,’’ Hurley said.

Northern Territory Police Commissioner Paul White earlier this year appointed a local superintendent and a retired assistant commissioner of police in South Australia state to review the investigation, following media claims it had been bungled.

Their findings will be released on Tuesday.

A police source told The Associated Press that the report criticises some aspects of the investigation, but generally endorses the way in which the inquiry has been conducted.

The source said one aspect that the report may condemn and which has already been heavily criticised in both the British and Australian press was a three-week delay in releasing a security video from an Alice Springs truck stop of a man Miss Lees said was probably the culprit.