Mobile now key to finding missing woman

The mobile phone of missing South African Kerry Winter may now hold the best chance of finding out where the 35-year-old is after an unknown man answered the phone on Sunday after three weeks of being switched off.

Relatives of Winter, who was beat with a baseball bat and dumped in the Dubai desert by her estranged British boyfriend on Aug. 20, said a man speaking broken English answered the phone, but then hung up straight away, UAE daily The National reported on Monday.

Since then they have been sending text messages to the phone constantly asking for information on Winter.

Relatives have raised the possibility that Winter may be being held against her will and the man who answered the phone is one of her captors.

They hope police can triangulate the location of the phone and the coordinates will lead them to the missing woman.

“We have been trying both her phones since she disappeared and they have been off, until this morning. We’re sending SMS messages to it constantly. I think it’s one of the people that is holding Kerry,” David Giles, Winter’s nephew, was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

“In this day and age, mobile phones can be very easily traced, so this is a bit of a breakthrough.”

Winter’s ex-boyfriend, 42-year-old Mark Arnold, has been arrested by police in connection with her disappearance.

Arnold, the director of a Middle East design company, has admitted to assaulting Winter, but claims he cleaned up her wounds and dropped her off on the side of the road in the desert.

Friends of Winter have portrayed Arnold as obsessive, possessive and jealous, and said Winter had accused her ex-boyfriend of stalking her and that she was forced to move home three times.

At the weekend hundreds of volunteers combed the streets of Dubai wearing T-shirts with "Help us find Kerry" written on them and handing out flyers in English and Urdu appealing for anyone with information to come forward.

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