KUCHING - When news filtered from the Borneo rainforest that some of the last nomadic hunter-gatherers on earth had set up new blockades against logging companies, the rumours rose like morning mist: another 'White Rajah' was at work.

He is French, said some in this sultry riverside state capital. A Swede, said others, or even a Swiss like the last White Rajah, activist Bruno Manser, who loathed the title bestowed on him by his detractors.

Manser, also dubbed Tarzan, Robin Hood, the Lone Wolf and, of course, the Wild Man of Borneo, disappeared in his beloved rainforest two years ago on May 25.

His friends and family fear he is dead. His body has never been found. How he died - if he died - remains a mystery in this land of myth and legend, which has one of the strangest histories in Asia.

Was he eliminated because he cost loggers millions of dollars? Did he succumb to one of the myriad perils of the rainforest? Was he murdered by robbers in a country once famed for its headhunters?

The slightly-built Swiss pacifist, who would now be 47, padded about the rainforest for six years in a loincloth and "John Lennon" glasses, carrying a blowpipe and a burning desire to save a disappearing way of life.

Manser's cause

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he led protests that brought the nomadic Penan hunter-gatherers and the destruction of the rainforest in Malaysia's largest state, Sarawak, to world attention.