Ivan Milet tour of backpacker murder forest sparks outrage

A travel company in Australia has been ordered to stop its "extreme terror tour" of a forest where seven backpackers were brutally murdered by the notorious serial killer Ivan Milat.

The bodies of two Britons, three Germans and two Australians, all aged between 19 and 22, were discovered in the Belanglo State Forest, New South Wales, in the 1990s.

One of Milat's British victims, Joanne Walters, a nursery worker from south Wales, was stabbed 21 times in the back and 14 times in the chest, her spine severed and paralysed by one blow. Her travelling companion, Caroline Clarke, a nanny from Northumberland, was shot ten times in the head, while one of the German victims, Anja Habschied, was decapitated and had her spinal cord severed.

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Goulburn Ghost Tours was charging £75 a person for a late-night Saturday tour of the area, reports the Daily Telegraph, with advertising slogans such as: "Once you enter Belanglo State Forest you may never come out."

New South Wales state government ordered the company to stop conducting the visits on the grounds that they had no permit. Mike Baird, the state premier, said the tours were "completely and utterly outrageous" and vowed that the company would not be given a permit if they applied for one. "It's not only in bad taste, it's just terrible. Horrendous," he said.

Goulburn Ghost Tours claimed it had been conducting tours around the forest with "sensitivity" towards the victims, but has now agreed to stop running them.

Milat, who pleaded not guilty, was handed seven life sentences in 1996 after another British backpacker managed to escape his clutches and testify against him.

However, in 2010, Milat's great-nephew Matthew Milat – who was 17 at the time – killed another teenager in the forest with an axe, later bragging to his friends "you know the last name Milat… I did what they do". He was given the maximum 43-year jail sentence.