Sabah Police have taken into custody two foreign men and two women for having allegedly stripped naked atop Mount Kinabalu.

Sabah Police Commissioner Jalaluddin Abdul Rahman said today the men were Canadian siblings, one of the women was British and the other, Dutch.

The British woman was arrested at the Tawau airport yesterday as she was about to depart for Kuala Lumpur, and the police brought her to Kota Kinabalu, he told a news conference at the Sabah Police headquarters.

Jalaluddin said the three others surrendered themselves at the Karamunsing district police station at about 6pm yesterday.

These four people are alleged to have been in a group of several foreign tourists who had stripped naked on May 30 at the South Peak of Mount Kinabalu, South-East Asia’s highest mountain at 4,095 metres.

“All the suspects will be remanded from today,” Jalaluddin said.

He also said that police were looking for the rest of the strippers, adding that police believed they were still in Sabah.

Jalaluddin advised the mountain guides to report to the police immediately if they came across indecent behaviour by climbers on Mount Kinabalu.

The local people believe that the tourists’ act of stripping naked on Mount Kinabalu angered the spirit of the mountain and caused the earthquake last Friday that killed 18 people who were then climbing the mountain.

- Bernama