Jaipur, Feb. 9: A Japanese tourist was allegedly raped here yesterday by a youth who had introduced himself as a guide, sparking fears that the incident could scare away foreign visitors at a time their numbers are rising.

The 20-year-old woman was touring the Jal Mahal, a scenic fort here when the youth approached her saying he was a guide, police said.

In his late 20s and fluent in English, the youth befriended her and offered to show her more spots inJaipur's vicinity, after which the woman agreed to accompany him on his bike.

They first visited Galtaji, a site around 10km from Jaipur that is home to several ancient temples and ponds where devotees take a dip. From there, he took her to Mozamabad, a hamlet 70km from away where he is said to have drugged and raped her. The youth fled after the assault.

When she came to, the woman went to the nearby Dudu police station with the help of some locals and lodged a complaint in which she also said that her iPhone and at least Rs 4,000 were missing.

Inspector-general of police (Jaipur range) D.C. Jain said efforts were on to arrest the youth by tracking his mobile phone whose number he had shared with the woman.

But Jain said one problem was that while the woman understood English, she could not speak the language properly.

Foreigners have been assaulted in Rajasthan earlier. A Japanese lady wasraped in Pushkar in 2006 by the owner of the guesthouse where she had put up. He was sentenced to seven years.

The same year, the state was rocked by the Bitti Mohanty case. Mohanty, the son of a top Odisha police officer, raped a German research scholar. He was sentenced to seven years within a month by a fast-track court. Bitti later jumped parole and was arrested several years later in 2013 from Kerala where he was working in disguise as a technician at a bank.

In 2005, a 47-year-old German was kidnapped and raped by two auto-rickshaw drivers in Jodhpur. The accused were tried in a fast-track court within a month and given a life term.

Following a rise in the number of such cases in Rajasthan and elsewhere in India, the UK, US, Australia, Switzerland and some other nations had issued travel advisories asking their citizens to be careful and take precautions, especially women travelling alone.

In recent years, though, Rajasthan has seen an increase in the number of tourists from abroad.

According to the state government, foreign-tourist arrivals from January to September 2014 stood at 10.2 lakh, an increase of nearly 9 per cent from 9.38 lakh in the corresponding period of 2013.