It has been 35 years since Ben Needham went missing, aged just 21 months old, and his family are still desperately waiting for answers.
Ben disappeared on the Greek island of Kos, where his maternal grandparents had a home in the village of Iraklis, near Kos town.
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On 24 July 1991, Ben had been left in the care of his grandparents, Eddie and Christine Needham, while his mum, Kerry, 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.
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.
Ben’s brave mum, Kerry, has never stopped fighting to find Ben and received the devastating news in May that South Yorkshire Police will no longer be investigating her son’s disappearance.
Kerry broke down “heartbroken and sobbing” after she was told the major crimes unit at South Yorkshire Police would not be responsible for any investigations into Ben’s case any more.
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Instead, they told her, it is the responsibility of the Greek police to undertake any future inquiries blaming lack of ‘time’ and ‘resources’.
She said: “This is devastating news. The case will now fall solely to the Greek authorities. If this happens, I feel like I may as well give up the search for Ben because the Greek police have only ever wanted this case to go away.
“For nearly 35 years, we have fought every single day to keep Ben’s case alive, to search for answers, and to make sure he is never forgotten. We believe there are still avenues to explore. This feels like a devastating step backwards.
“I do everything in my power. If my police are taken away from me what am I going to do with that information? All of my blood sweat and tears would have been for nothing. I feel abandoned.
“I will never get to know anything if the Greek police are in charge of it, because they won’t do anything. They won’t organise DNA tests, they’ll just put it in a file and move on. I’m gobsmacked.”
She has reason to fear as the Greek police have previously been accused of a ‘cover up’ amid claims of fake and inconsistent witness statements alongside a failure to lock down the island after Ben vanished.
Kerry recalls how the police treated them as an unfit family after Ben went missing, suggesting they were travellers as they lived in a caravan at the time.
This narrative was further reinforced by fake claims Kerry had been with a man the night Ben vanished. But when British police contacted this witness he also admitted it was a lie and claimed he was coerced into signing the statement by officers to smear her name.
“I had a child and I went to work and that was kind of frowned upon at the time. They would talk to my dad but not me. I was 19 and young so I was not important in their eyes. But these officers told someone to make a false statement regarding me, so they were trying to blacken my name.
“How can I trust them now? They basically tried to make out whatever had happened to Ben, he was probably better off anyway. I personally don’t think that their mentality has changed at all.
There have been no big leads coming from the Greek authorities since Ben vanished. Then in 2011, the South Yorkshire force got involved and carried out the first of two major searches at the farmhouse in Kos where Ben was last seen.
The second dig searching for Ben, took place in 2016, after British officers were told by a witness that the toddler could have been crushed to death in a horror digger accident, involving Konstantinos Dino Barkas. But no proof of the accident ‘theory’ has ever been found.
The Mirror