http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/sto...ff8b8bd&k=22845
Vancouver woman missing in Middle East
CanWest, The Province
Published: Wednesday, May 02, 2007
The Department of Foreign Affairs is investigating the case of a missing Canadian woman who was travelling in the Middle East and vanished five weeks ago.
Nicole Vienneau, 32, of Vancouver was last heard from on March 29, when she was just outside of Damascus, her mother, Kathryn Murray, said from Toronto.
Murray said her daughter had embarked on her solo trip, which had taken her to Africa, at the beginning of November.
****"She's a seasoned traveller and she's a seasoned solo traveller," said Murray of Vienneau, an adventurous, active woman who was on her fourth major world trip and was in regular e-mail and phone contact with family and friends.
Murray said family members are working with Foreign Affairs and the RCMP.
She said they've been assured consulate officials overseas are "fully engaged" in the investigation.
Murray said the only thing they know for certain is that Vienneau did not enter Turkey, which was her destination after Syria.
A blog entry posted by her brother asks other backpackers for help in finding her.
A budget traveller, Vienneau typically stayed in inexpensive hotels and hostels.
Murray said Foreign Affairs has been in contact with the family on a daily basis.
"Part of the frustration they experience is the number of false alarms that happen when the traveller is inconsiderate and has not contacted anyone for a number of weeks and then turns up," she said.
"What happens is when you have a legitimate one, it's hard to get the embassies overseas interested in the beginning."
Vienneau, who has a fine-arts and business degree and worked at a number of jobs, was described by Murray as an active woman who played soccer and sang in a choir.
- CanWest News Service
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http://www.thestar.com/News/article/213174
Brother's quest filled with hope and dread
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Syrian ambassador authorizes free visas for sibling, boyfriend to fly to Damascus to try to find missing Canadian woman
May 12, 2007 04:30 AM
Oakland Ross
Middle East Bureau
AMMAN, JordanIf the world according to Nicole Vienneau had unfolded as it should, the 32-year-old global traveller would be arriving back in Canada on Monday, to be met by her mother at the airport in Toronto.
She would be tired but smiling, happy to be home but also probably a little sad to have finally come to the end of a long, mostly solo Middle Eastern trek.
But that emotional reunion is not what will be happening.
Instead, her older brother Matthew Vienneau, a 34-year-old self-employed information-technology consultant, expects to land in Damascus, Syria on the very day she was supposed to come home.
There, he is to be met by officials from the Canadian embassy before launching a search for an adventurous and self-reliant woman who has been missing for nearly six weeks.
The next day, accompanied by Nicole's boyfriend, Gary Schweitzer of Vancouver, Vienneau will head for Hama, roughly 100 kilometres north of Damascus, where his sister was last seen before vanishing on March 31 or April 1.
Like much else about this worrisome tale, the date of her disappearance is uncertain.
"It's actually very frustrating," Vienneau said yesterday from Toronto.
He was referring to his attempts to pin down the exact date when Nicole fell out of contact with the world around her. "Right now, it's hazy."
The daughter of David Vienneau, a former Toronto Star reporter and Ottawa bureau chief who died of cancer three years ago, Nicole makes her home in Vancouver. She is an experienced backpacker who has taken many marathon journeys through some of the remotest regions in the world.
She was backpacking through Syria, intending to carry on northward to Turkey, when her track suddenly came to a mysterious end. According to her brother, she's made no bank transactions since the end of March.
Since his sister's disappearance first garnered public attention a week ago, Vienneau has continued to ride a psychological roller-coaster of hope and dread. Just the other day, he learned that the corpses of two so far unidentified women have turned up in Syria, and he immediately thought the worst.
But he is now convinced that neither body could be Nicole's. One was discovered on March 29, which is too early, while the other appears to be that of a woman who was out for a jog and was hit by a car on April 4.
"I assume we'll find out in a couple of days," he said yesterday. Since late April, Vienneau has been providing daily updates on a blog devoted to his sister's disappearance, and many Middle Eastern travellers and others have been pitching in to help in his efforts to find out what happened to Nicole.
"It's amazing what people have done," he said. "It's been really wonderful."
A Canadian teacher, who is working in the part of Syria where Nicole disappeared, spent a couple of days journeying in the countryside around Hama, questioning local people. Arabic speakers in different parts of the world have helped by translating documents or newspaper articles that have appeared in the Syrian press.
"It was someone on the Internet who said she'd been seen at this hotel," said Vienneau. He meant the Cairo Hotel in Hama, where his sister had been staying and where Canadian officials in Damascus later retrieved her belongings. The hotel waited three days before reporting her missing, he said.
Unfortunately, that report went unheeded, and little or nothing was done at the time.
It was not until Nicole had been out of contact for two weeks her agreed-upon limit of silence that family in Canada got well and truly worried, but still they decided not to over-react.
"We gave it an extra week," said Vienneau. "Foolishly, in hindsight."
Since then, he has been in almost daily contact with the Canadian embassy in Damascus. This week, he met with the Syrian ambassador in Ottawa, who authorized free visas for Vienneau and Schweitzer.
"She wanted to get out and enjoy the world," said Vienneau, who in the past has joined his sister on parts of the long and rugged treks that she loved.
If there is time, Vienneau will update his blog from Internet cafes along the way. Readers can follow his progress at vienneau.livejournal.com.