Ben Needham's mum urges police to rule out link with boy found in German river

01 September 2023 , 21:01

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Reconstruction of body found in Bavaria

The mum of Ben Needham hopes British detectives will investigate if a boy’s body found in Germany could be her missing son.

Kerry Needham, 51, has alerted South Yorkshire Police to an Interpol appeal to identify a young child’s body found dumped in the River Danube. Her 21-month old son vanished from the Greek island of Kos in 1991. This week German Police asked for help to identify a child, believed to be aged five to six, whose body was found in Bavaria in May 2022.

Kerry said: “I am hoping our British police will check this out and contact the German officers about this. We need to rule it out. I’ve always said all along that I don’t believe he’s died.” Interpol said the boy was 3ft 6ins tall and weighed around 2st 4lbs with brown hair. The boy’s body had been wrapped in foil and weighed down with a flagstone.

Interpol released a reconstruction of the boy and and suggested he may have been trafficked but they did not know how long he had been in the water. It’s chief, Jurgen Stock said it was “unusual to have a child’s body go unidentified for this long”.

Kerry Needham on Kos (MDM)

Kerry, from Sheffield, said: “The reconstruction has a look of Ben. I never realised how child trafficking is so rife and massive. I spoke to a man this week who was trafficked out of Greece in the 1950s. It is still happening today in Greece but very underground.”

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South Yorkshire police have Ben’s DNA on file. The force carried out two digs in Kos in 2016, convinced the toddler died in a horror digger accident and his body hidden.

Lucy Thornton