Body found in Malaysia amid search for missing British backpacker
Jordan Johnson-Doyle reportedly went missing last week after taking part in a quiz night at a pub in Bangsar, near where the body was found
Malaysian authorities have found the body of an unidentified foreign man in a suburb on the outskirts of its capital, Kuala Lumpur, where police have been searching for a British backpacker who went missing last week.
Local police launched a search operation in the affluent neighbourhood of Bangsar in a bid to find Jordan Johnson-Doyle after his father filed a missing persons report on Monday.
The 25-year-old reportedly went missing on May 27 after taking part in a quiz night at a pub in the area.
Police said a search team found the decomposed body at the bottom of a flooded lift shaft at a construction site at about 5pm on Wednesday. It was lying face down with most of its clothes off.
“It has not been established whether the body is that of a United Kingdom national who was recently reported missing,” Brickfields district police chief Ku Mashariman Ku Mahmood was quoted as saying by national newswire Bernama late Wednesday.
The body has since been moved to a nearby hospital for postmortem and identification, Ku Mashariman said.
It was found in a secluded location about 1km (0.6 miles) from where Johnson-Doyle was last seen.
Johnson-Doyle had been on a solo trip across Southeast Asia for the past year while working remotely as a software engineer for a US firm, according to reports by British media. He arrived in Malaysia on May 17 after a stint in Vietnam.
His mother, Leanne Burnett, tracked his phone to a block of flats near the bar where he was last seen before the signal was lost on May 30. “This was the last place it had a signal. It was a block of flats in that same area, literally down the road from the bar,” she told the Liverpool Echo.
Johnson-Doyle’s family has flown to Malaysia to join the search for him.
