A wealthy British businessman has allegedly confessed to beating his former girlfriend and dumping her in the Dubai desert on the day she disappeared.

Mark Arnold, 42, has insisted to police that Kerry Winter was alive and well when he left her two weeks ago and that he has no idea where she is now.

The missing women’s family have received a series of text messages from her mobile telephone saying she alive and asking about the police investigation. However, they now suspect the messages were sent by someone else.

Mr Arnold, from the Midlands, flew to Britain two days after Ms Winter vanished on August 20. He returned to Dubai three days later and was arrested.

Friends claim that Ms Winter, 35, had accused her former lover of stalking her in the weeks before her disappearance and that she had been forced to move home three times.

Neighbours told police they saw her being beaten with a baseball bat outside her villa in the Al Barsha suburb. When they tried to intervene, they were also attacked and chased away.

The attacker then bundled a bleeding Ms Winter into her car and drove off. The car was later found abandoned.

Mr Arnold, a director of a leading Middle East design company, has been charged with assaulting Ms Winter.

Ms Winter’s brother Kurt Winter and nephew Dave Giles were asked by Dubai police to talk to Mr Arnold in the hope that he would revealed her whereabouts. They spoke to him twice but he stuck to the same story, they said.

“He admits assaulting Kerry, but says that he cleaned up her head wound and dropped her off on the side of the road in the desert,” said Mr Giles. “He says that she was coherent and fine when he left her.

“We spoke to him for about 15 minutes. He seemed very relaxed and calm in his conversation but it is easy to rile him. It’s like he is pretending to be sorry and remorseful, but when you look in his eyes, there’s nothing there.

“He is still telling us the same story that when he left her she was fine and that he left her in the Arabian Ranches.”

Ms Winter, an events organiser from Johannesburg, South Africa has lived in the Arab emirate for seven years. She had been with Mr Arnold for five years and the couple where prominent members of Dubai’s ex-patriate community.

Ms Winter’s sister-in-law, Lia Winter, said that Mr Arnold was totally obsessed with his former girlfriend and had beeen jealous and possessive during their relationship.

“Things deteriorated drastically after she broke up with him in May,” she said. “From then on he stalked her continuously. Kerry saw him parked outside her home often and he followed her when she went out in her car.”

She claimed that Mr Arnold had falsely accused Ms Winter of theft which had led police confiscating her passport. The charges were dropped when she proved that she was in South Africa on the day of the alleged offences.

“Two days after getting her passport back Kerry disappeared,” said Mrs Winter.

More than 4,000 volunteers have been scouring streets and desert roads for the missing women her relatives have been assured that a body found on Monday was not Ms Winter. Her family have also set up a Facebook site, Help us find Kerry, to promote the search which as attracted more than 3,000 members.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman confirmed tonight that Mr Arnold was arrested on August 25 over the disappearance of his girlfriend.

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