Is this missing Ben Needham?

A NEW artist's impression of how missing Sheffield boy Ben Needham might look now has been released today - in time for his 18th birthday.

The new picture - drawn by the Metropolitan Police facial imaging team at the request of Ben's mother Kerry Grist - is to be posted on the UK Police Missing Persons Bureau website in time for his birthday on October 29.

The digital image shows how he might look now, 16 years after his disappearance from the garden of a farmhouse on the Greek island of Kos in July 1991, when he was just 21 months old.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It was created using family photographs to suggest how the young boy's looks would have changed as he matured into a young man.

Kerry, from Strawberry Avenue, Ecclesfield, says she wants it widely circulated in the hope that Ben himself or somebody he knows will spot it. She still believes her son is alive, saying she takes hope from the fact there has never been any evidence put forward to suggest he is dead.

But Kerry claims her family did not receive as much help as the family of missing toddler Madeleine McCann because, unlike the McCanns, they are "working class" without friends in high places.

She welcomed the support the McCann family has been given by the British authorities, but she said nothing like that was ever offered to her.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

"We're just an ordinary working class family and I don't think people thought that Ben was important enough," she said. "It's really, really sad but that's how it comes across to us."

Ben has not been seen since his disappearance from the house Kerry's parents and brother were renovating in Kos. She was working as a waitress on the Greek island at the time but eventually moved back to Sheffield when the investigation into Ben's disappearance fizzled out.

Theories have included suggestions that Ben was killed, abducted, or sold on to a family who could not have a child and police have never closed the file.

Following the disappearance of Madeline McCann, Kerry wrote to the British Government and Greek Prime Minister urging them to review Ben's case and she regularly returns to the island in the hope of tracking her child down.

The new picture of Ben is to be posted on the UK Police Missing Persons Bureau website - www.missingkids.co.uk/missingkids.

Main news index