The mother of Ben Needham has shared an update on her son's case, after receiving DNA test results from a man in Denmark claiming to be the missing toddler.
Ben was just 21-months-old when he vanished from the Greek island of Kos back in 1991, where he had been staying with his his grandparents Eddie and Christine at their holiday home.
The youngster had been playing with his toy cars outside near a derelict farmhouse his were helping renovate, when they noticed he had vanished at around 2.30pm on 24 July.
Various searches and excavations took place in the following years, with South Yorkshire Police stating in 2016 that they believed he had been accidentally killed by a local man driving a digger on the day.
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However there has been no definitive evidence to prove what happened to Ben.
33 years on from the disappearance of her son, Kerry Needham refuses to give up on finding answers.
The family were thrown a major landline earlier this year when a Danish man came forward to claim that he was the missing child and had memories of his grandparents saying he was taken from Kos as a child.
South Yorkshire Police would later confirm the man had taken a DNA test, adding to hopes that the mystery of Ben's disappearance could finally be solved.
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However, a spokesperson has since revealed the DNA sample was not a match for Ben. The man's sample was compared to a Guthrie heel-prick test performed when Ben was born at Boston Hospital in Lincolnshire.
Despite the setback, Kerry, 51, has since revealed in an interview with The Mirror that she refuses to give up on finding answers about what happened to her son.
"I will never give up for as long as I live," she said. "I knew in my heart of hearts it wasn’t him but there’s always that hope, there’s always that chance. It could be someone you least expect, it’s always possible. So this is disappointing, obviously."
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She continued: "We won’t let this deter us from appealing to other people to come forward, if they think they could be Ben.
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"We will always take any information confidentially. Always willing to do a DNA test on anybody. The search goes on. It’s a case of rebuilding my strength and hope again, to continue with the search."
This isn't the first time someone has come forward claiming to be Ben in recent years, with the mum recounting a 'traumatic' experience she had in 2023.
"I try my best not to have personal contact with somebody, but then my guilty conscience eats away at me and I think, if he is Ben, then by me not talking to him I am rejecting him and I can't do that," Kerry said in an interview with ITV.
"But at the end of the day when it turns out not to [be] Ben it's soul destroying."
Topics: UK News
Brenna Cooper