WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The police in New Zealand found a body Sunday in their search for Grace Millane, a British backpacker who vanished a week ago on the night before her 22nd birthday.

The announcement came a day after the police said that they were questioning a 26-year-old man in connection with Ms. Millane’s disappearance, and that they believed she was dead. The man, who has not been named, was charged with murder Saturday night and will appear in the Auckland District Court on Monday.

On Sunday, officers cordoned off part of a road that runs through a forested area of the Waitakere Ranges on the western outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.

Detective Inspector Scott Beard said a body had been found “about 10 meters” off the road. A formal identification will take place Monday, but he said he believed the body was Ms. Millane’s.

She was last seen on Dec. 1, entering the CityLife Hotel in central Auckland with the 26-year-old man. Inspector Beard said that the pair had been together throughout the evening at “a number of places,” and that their images had been captured on closed-circuit television cameras.

When Ms. Millane did not contact her family on Dec. 2, her birthday, they became worried. After arriving in New Zealand on Friday, her father, David Millane, said she had “never been out of contact for this amount of time” and had “bombarded” the family with pictures and stories from her trip. British news reports described Mr. Millane as a millionaire property developer.

As well as appealing for information from the public on social media, the family reported Ms. Millane missing to the police in Auckland, who began investigating on Wednesday.

Ms. Millane, who is from Wickford in the English county of Essex, had planned to spend a year traveling after her graduation in September from the University of Lincoln. After a six-week tour of Peru, she arrived in New Zealand alone on Nov. 20, planning a two-week stay before traveling to Australia. She was, her father said, a “lovely, outgoing, fun-loving, family-oriented daughter.”

Ms. Millane had been staying at a hostel in central Auckland..

A rental car seized by officers on Saturday proved central to their investigation; after examining the vehicle and a room at the CityLife Hotel, the police concluded that Ms. Millane was dead.

The car was rented in Auckland on Dec. 2, the day after Ms. Millane disappeared. Her body was found about 16 miles away from where she was last seen.

On social media, New Zealanders expressed shock and dismay about the killing. New Zealand’s annual murder rate is in the double figures, and deadly attacks by strangers are rare.

In 2008, Karen Aim, a tourist in her 20s from Scotland, was killed in the city of Taupo by a local teenager. And in 2005, Birgit Brauer, 28, was found dead in a national park near the city of New Plymouth. She was killed by a man who picked her up while she was hitchhiking.

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