Disappearance of Ben Needham

Disappearance

Ben Needham was staying with his family on the Greek island of Kos, where his maternal grandparents had a home in the village of Iraklis, near Kos town. He went missing on 24 July 1991.

On the day of his disappearance Ben had been left in the care of his grandparents while his mother went to work at a local hotel. Ben had been coming in and out of a farmhouse the family were renovating when, at approximately 2:30 pm, the adults realised he had disappeared.

Search efforts

The family first searched the area for Ben, assuming he had wandered off, or that the boy's teenage uncle, Stephen, had taken him out on his moped. When no trace of the boy was found, the police were notified. They initially questioned the Needhams, viewing them as suspects, which delayed notification of airports and docks. Over the following 11 days, searches of the area were carried out by Hellenic Police, Hellenic Army and fire brigade personnel. Nikolaos Dakouras, the island's chief of police, said: "We now believe we have searched every possible part of that area, and the boy is not there. It leaves us with a great mystery. We have no theories. We have no solutions." Following a request from UK Prime Minister John Major, the Hellenic Army undertook further searches of the island in January 1993.

Alleged sightings

There have been more than 300 reported sightings of boys matching Ben's description, both on the Greek mainland and on Greek islands. Most were reported shortly after his disappearance during 1991 to 1992. In December 1995, Stratos Bakirtzis, a private investigator, found a blond boy, aged around six years old, living with a gypsy family in a camp located in Salonika, Greece. Bakirtzis told Greek TV network ANT1 that the child said he had been "given to the gypsies because his parents did not want him." Police from Veria took the boy into custody and determined he was not Ben Needham. Ioannis Panousis, Veria's chief of police, said the child's birth certificate was authentic and that the child's natural father was currently serving a prison sentence and had left him in the care of the gypsy couple.

In November 1998, John Cookson saw a blonde boy of about ten playing on a beach in Rhodes. Cookson said that the child was known as 'the blond one' by his friends and was the only fair haired child in the group of dark haired Greek children. Suspicious, he took photographs of the children and used the pretext of tousling the boy's head to acquire a hair sample for DNA analysis. However, DNA testing proved the boy was not Ben, and the Greek boy's family also provided infant photographs to prove he was their child.

In October 2003, Ian Crosby made a visit to Kos with Ben's uncle Danny, followed by further visits to meet police from Greece. Crosby has also investigated a photograph, sent to him by a holidaymaker who visited Turkey in 1999, which depicts a number of Turkish village children, including a blonde boy who resembles the age progression photo of what Ben might look like aged 13.

The Needham family believed that Ben was kidnapped with the intention of selling him for adoption, or that he was taken by child traffickers. Carol Sarler, writing in The Times in 2007, said: "I have repeatedly asked police and press, British and Greek, for a single example to support this rumour. There is none. When pretty little Western European kiddies go missing... we know about it; if we don't know, it isn't happening. Those of us who properly investigated Ben's disappearance are certain he was not [abducted]; put bluntly, a child less than 2, toddling unsupervised for five hours on a baking, remote, inhospitable hillside that is still largely unsearched, is easy prey to the lonely accident."

Age progression images

In September 1992, South Yorkshire police used electronic facial identification technique (E-FIT) software to produce an image of how Ben might appear at age 3. The picture was reproduced on posters which were displayed at airports around the Greek islands. It was thought to be the first time that E-FIT had been used to age a person's appearance. Age progression images were created and distributed again in March 2000, June 2003, October 2007 and September 2016.

October 2012

In October 2012, police from the United Kingdom travelled to Greece to search an area that they believed might contain Ben Needham's remains. On 19 October, Greek police, assisted by a team of specialist search advisors from South Yorkshire Police, began an operation to examine the grounds of the property from which Ben disappeared.

The operation, involving geophysical survey equipment, forensic archaeologists and human remains detection (HRD) dogs, was triggered by a police line of inquiry into whether Ben had been accidentally buried as a result of an excavator driver dumping building rubble nearby. The operation did not detect any trace of the child.

September 2016

In September 2016, police informed Kerry Needham that they had learned that a man from Kos had said that Konstantinos Barkas, a digger operator, now deceased, had told him that Ben had died in an accident, and that Barkas had hidden the body in building waste. On 16 September police began a search for remains, in a different area from the one searched nearly four years earlier. Excavations were focused around a tree, apparently planted since Ben vanished. A replica of the sandals he had been wearing was being made, to see if they matched any found items.

The excavation work ended on 16 October. More than 800 tonnes of soil had been dug up, with any items of interest sent back to the UK for forensic analysis. DI Cousins said that one item which was found "close to an item dated to 1991" had been identified by the Needham family as being in Ben's possession at the time he went missing. Cousins said: "My team and I know that machinery, including a large digger, was used to clear an area of land on 24 July 1991, behind the farmhouse that was being renovated by the Needhams. It is my professional belief that Ben Needham died as a result of an accident near to the farmhouse in Iraklis where he was last seen playing. The recovery of this item, and its location, further adds to my belief that material was removed from the farmhouse on or shortly after the day that Ben disappeared."

New findings in 2017

In July 2017, South Yorkshire Police announced that traces of blood were found on a fragment of a sandal, as well as on soil from inside a toy car, both items believed to belong to Ben. The head of the British soil forensics group, professor Lorna Dawson, said her team discovered a genetic "profile indicative of human blood decomposition" on the piece of sandal and that the next step is to extract DNA from the fragment to determine who the blood belongs to. According to Inspector Jon Cousins, these findings further strengthen the theory according to which Ben was killed the day he disappeared and is buried in Kos.

In the media

The disappearance of Ben Needham has been the subject of several television documentaries: