Tourists Who Posed Naked on Malaysian Mountain Freed After Pleading Guilty to Obscene Acts
A group of tourists who posed naked on a Malaysian mountain and were accused of causing an earthquake by disrespecting the sancity of the area were jailed on Friday for three days. Danielle and Lindsey Paterson from Canada, Eleanor Hawkins from the U.K. and Dutch national Dylan Snel were also each fined 1330 when they appeared in court in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah state. The jail sentence was to run from the day of their arrest on June 9 and the four were released after they were sentenced. They pleaded guilty earlier Friday to committing obscene acts on May 30. The four defendants, who were a part of a larger group, challenged each other to strip naked in the near freezing temperature on the mountain top. The defendants' lawyer Ronny Cham said that the tourists did not know local customs and appealed to the judge to not make an example of them. "Their act had brought shame and ridicule upon themselves and their respective countries," he said. Last Friday's earthquake killed 18 people and left hundreds stranded on the mountain.