British police attempt to solve mystery of boy who went missing 25 years ago

Twenty-five years ago, an English toddler, Ben Needham, disappeared during a family holiday on the Greek island of Kos. Intensive investigations and an unrelenting campaign by his family have turned up no trace of him.

Now, new information has come to light and police have started excavating an area close to where the boy disappeared, then aged just 21 months.

A local man has told police that his friend, Konstantinos Barkas, a builder, may have accidentally killed Ben while clearing land with his excavator, and buried him.

Barkas died of stomach cancer last year and his widow, Varvara, strongly dismissed any idea that her husband killed Ben.

British police said two areas had been marked and the dig was expected to take 10 to 12 days. The land has been intensively farmed over many years and animal bone fragments are plentiful. Each one has to be tested. If any bone is found to be human, it will be sent to England for DNA family matching.

According to the BBC, nearly 500 British people went missing abroad last year. Some were quickly found alive, others were dead. But with many, the mystery is never-ending.

Where it is particularly harrowing is when children are involved. Katrice Lee, aged two, disappeared from a supermarket on a British military base at Paderborn, Germany, in 1981. Her soldier father, Richard Lee, said: “I have always believed she is alive, snatched on order perhaps, and sold to some childless couple.”

Madeleine McCann was a few days short of her fourth birthday when she disappeared from her bed in holiday apartments in Praia de Luz, Portugal. Her parents were having supper in a nearby restaurant. That was in 2007. Investigations were intensive and one newspaper described her apparent abduction as “the most heavily reported missing person case in history.” But no clue has ever emerged as to the girl’s fate.

What is particularly hard for families is when hopes rise and are dashed, as promising clues evaporate and trails lead to dead ends. Sometimes, the mystery seems to be solved, but then …

Charles Horvath-Allen disappeared while travelling through Canada in 1989. He sent his family a fax saying he was planning to fly to Hong Kong. Then, zero.

In 1992, Canadian police received an anonymous letter claiming that the young Briton was killed in a bar fight and his body dumped in a lake. Police searched the lake and found the body of a young man. But it was not Horvath-Allen. So the agony goes on.

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Mountains of words, heaps of photos and miles of film footage are devoted to the world’s news every day, but sometimes it takes only one tiny incident to tell the whole story. The scene was bomb-devastated Aleppo, Syria. Sitting among the rubble, next to a black bag, a grey-haired man lifted his head and called, “Hassan, Hassan.”

The voice of the BBC reporter: “Hassan is his son. He is in the body bag.”

The father leaned forward and zipped the bag partly open. “Hassan,” he called, “get up.”

Then medics came and carried the body bag to an ambulance. The father followed.

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Many thanks to those kind folks who enquired as to my state of health following my spectacular header down the railway station steps.

It is too boring to recite in detail, except to say that while pain was expected, nausea and depression were unwelcome side-effects. A two-and-a-half-hour visit to my nearest A&E department got me a physical check-up, an assurance that no bones were broken and a different pain-killer to the four I had already tried. The thing about pain-killers is this: You take them, but you still have the pain. So you conclude they don’t work. But maybe if you didn’t take them, the pain would be worse.

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A father has been reprimanded for not spending enough quality time with his family. He’s a bit indignant about this and asks his son: “Paul, do you think I neglect you?” The response: “Dad, my name is Billy.”

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The water carrier appeared in the market place with his head shaved. Sorrowfully, he told an inquiring friend that Surgat Singh had died. The friend shaved his head and then all of the friend’s friends shaved their heads, and so did the king’s chief minister.

When the king saw his chief minister had shaved his head, he asked why, and the chief minister said it was because Surgat Singh had died. The king then asked who was Surgat Singh, but the chief minister didn’t know and neither did anybody else.

Eventually, they tracked down the water carrier and asked him who was Surgat Singh and he said Surgat Singh was his donkey. Everybody felt like an ass, apart from the king.

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