A Lebanese taxi driver has been arrested after a British diplomat was found dead near a Beirut highway

Department for International Development

Rebecca Dykes was found dead by a highway outside Beirut.

• Rebecca Dykes was found dead in the capital of Lebanon.
• Her body was found by a roadside over the weekend.
• She had been at a party the previous night.
• Lebanese state media say a taxi driver has been arrested.

A taxi driver has been arrested after a British diplomat in Lebanon was found dead by a motorway over the weekend.

Rebecca Dykes, who worked at the British embassy in Beirut, had reportedly been at a work gathering on Friday night hours before she was killed.

According to Lebanese state media, a taxi driver named as Tareq H was caught by police and is believed to be her killer.

According to the state-run National News Agency, the driver "attempted to rape her, before dumping strangling her [sic] and dumping her body on the road."

The agency claimed that the taxi driver has confessed to killing Dykes.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Dykes' body was found on Saturday after she spent the previous evening at a farewell party for a colleague in the busy Gemmayzeh district of Beirut.

The newspaper said she left the bar around midnight with a friend before they parted ways five minutes away from Dykes' home. She didn't drink that night, the Telegraph said, as she had been due to fly home for Christmas the next morning.

Google Maps/Business Insider

A map of Beirut showing Dykes' approximate location on the night she was killed.

Dykes' body was found near the Metn motorway, located around 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) outside from the city centre. A forensic examination cited by The Guardian said she died around 4 a.m. on Saturday.

Dykes had been a Programme and Policy Manager with Britain's Department for International Development.

Her family said in a statement, as cited by the BBC: "We are devastated by the loss of our beloved Rebecca. We are doing all we can to understand what happened."

Britain's ambassador to Lebanon, Hugo Shorter, tweeted: "The whole embassy is deeply shocked, saddened by this news" and is "working very closely" with police.

The Telegraph's correspondent in Beirut, Josie Ensor, wrote on Monday: "Miss Dykes' death has shocked the small expat community in Beirut. Lebanon is a relatively safe place for foreigners, and has been mostly calm since the end of the bloody 15-year civil war in 1990."