Ben Needham

On 24 July 1991, Ben Needham (born 29 October 1989), a 21-month-old English child, disappeared on the Greek island of Kos.

After initial searches failed to locate him, he was believed to have been kidnapped.

Despite numerous claims of sightings, his whereabouts remain unknown.

He went missing on 24 July 1991.

On the day of his disappearance, Ben had been left in the care of his grandparents, Eddie and Kristine Needham, 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 2:30pm, the adults realised he had disappeared.

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."

Most were reported shortly after his disappearance during 1991 to 1992.

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.

Following a request from UK Prime Minister John Major, the Hellenic Army undertook further searches of the island in January 1993.

There have been more than 300 reported sightings of boys matching Ben's description, both on the Greek mainland and on Greek islands.

In December 1995, Stratos Bakirtzis, a private investigator, found a blond boy, aged around six years old, living with a Romani 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 Romani 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.

Crosby was sent a photograph, 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.

In 2003 Investigator Ian Crosby, aware nothing was be done to resolve Ben’s disappearance, launched the first ever website to draw attention to Ben’s case.

BenNeedhamStillMissing.info  He began a media awareness campaign.

In October 2003, Ian Crosby made a visit to Kos with Ben's uncle Danny, followed by further visits to meet police from Greece.

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."

In October 2012, South Yorkshire Police began to follow a line of inquiry which suggested that Ben had been accidentally killed and buried in a mound of rubble by an excavator driver working in a field adjoining the house where he was last seen.

Extensive excavation of the rubble was undertaken by British and Greek Police.

One item of particular interest to the police was a Dinky toy car, which they hoped to recover and believed could be "key to discovering his fate."

The search failed to detect any human remains or items belonging to Ben.

Kerrys book ‘Ben’ published in 2013 details more about Ian’s commitment to the case.

In September 2016, the police returned to Kos to carry out further excavations.

Although no remains were found, a yellow Dinky car, believed to have been Ben's, was recovered.

Detective Inspector Jon Cousins, heading the inquiry, said: "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."

In November 2018, British police said that blood found on the aforementioned toy car was not Ben's.

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.