Woman terrified partner was dead when ‘guards dragged him away’ in holiday hell

A Brit spent close to a day terrified her boyfriend had been killed when no one told her he had been dragged from their hotel to a squalid cell, she claims.

Sarah Hope says she was left “lost, helpless and thinking the worst” when partner Dave Peden vanished from the Rui Yucatan in Playa Del Carmen during a TUI package holiday.

As the sun set on the Mexican resort the 40-year-old dashed from hotel to hotel, desperately searching for her 39-year-old partner whose phone and wallet had been left in their room.

Almost a full day after Dave was chucked out of the hotel over a confrontation he had had with two fellow guests, Sarah says she was told he had been locked up.

When she arrived at the police station to pay the bail, he said security guards had roughly dragged him unconscious to the cops after he collapsed from heat stroke.

Hotel staff had forced the battered and bruised man to wander the Mexican town’s mid-thirties Celsius streets with nothing but the clothes on his back, no way to contact his girlfriend and no passport.

“I was panicking,” Sarah said when she realised her boyfriend was missing.

“I didn’t know what to do. I was thinking the worst. I had all sorts of thoughts going through my head.”

She sent a message to her brother back home in the UK, who told her to alert staff to Dave’s absence.

While Sarah did, her mum and dad went to the TUI shop in Carlisle where the couple had booked the holiday.

When staff at the hotel said they didn’t know where her partner had gone, Sarah’s mind began to race.

Earlier in the day Dave had had an argument with two British men at the hotel who the couple claim had offered them drugs.

“I was scared as hell,” she said.

“I didn’t know if those two blokes were still about. I thought they had done something to him.

“I just kept thinking the worst. My stomach was churning.”

After hours of fretfully searching the resort, at 4.30am she claims a TUI rep called from the UK explaining that Dave had been found.

He was locked up on the other side of town, where he says he had spent 17 hours in a cell strewn with human faeces with nothing but the concrete to sleep on.

When a rep at the hotel eventually told Sarah where exactly he was being kept a full five hours later, she jumped in a taxi and headed to the police station.

After paying the officers £250 to let him out, Dave told his girlfriend how the confrontation unfolded.

“I came down into the lobby and the two of them were there,” he claims.

“The bigger one started taking his top off and walked towards me. I tried to walk away but they came after me.

“I told him (the larger man) to go “f**k himself and pushed him.”

Dave then fled the scene, hiding in another part of the hotel until members of staff escorted him from the premises.

Once he was let out of custody, the couple claim they returned to the hotel to be told that Dave was not allowed back in to collect his possessions.

Sarah retrieved his belongings and they set about finding another place to stay, which she says they forked out £1,200 for.

With hotel staff allegedly refusing to communicate with the couple and no one explaining what he had been charged with, Dave turned to TUI reps back in the UK.

They explained that because he had been evicted for “aggressive behaviour” his “TUI service and rep service” was void – despite him not having received any kind of official notice or refund for the termination, the couple claim.

Now Dave and Sarah are hoping that they will both be able to get on the TUI transfer from the hotel to the airport so they can catch their plane home.

Having spent all their money on the two hotels, they have been forced to turn to friends back home to scrape together enough cash to get a taxi if Dave is refused access to the coach.

“We don’t know if we can go home or not,” Dave said.

“We’re trying to raise enough money to get a taxi to the airport.

“We came away for a holiday and we weren’t expecting this to happen. We can’t cancel the other hotel room and they’re not responding to our messages.

“It’s disgusting to do this to a British tourist.”

TUI was contacted for comment.