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By Melissa Fleur Afshar
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The mother of a British toddler who vanished while outside his grandparent's property in Greece 35 years ago has shared a new theory about what she believes happened to her missing son.
Kerry Needham, now 53, thinks that her son Ben may have been abducted by a child trafficking gang and sold for illegal adoption, as police prepare to carry out a new DNA test on a man who could be Ben.
Ben was 21 months old when he disappeared on July 24, 1991. He was last seen playing outside of his grandparents’ farmhouse on the idyllic Greek island of Kos in the Aegean Sea. His mother has passed new information to South Yorkshire Police in England after receiving an email from a woman who said her boyfriend might be Ben, writing that there were “a lot of coincidences” and “a lot of things don’t add up from his past.”
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The force intends to conduct a DNA test to determine whether the man is a match.
Newsweek reached out to Needham via email for comment.
Needham has long rejected a separate theory that emerged in 2012, suggesting Ben was accidentally killed when a digger crushed him in an olive grove behind the farmhouse. Three years after that, an anonymous tipster claimed that digger driver Konstantinos “Dino” Barkas had confessed on his deathbed to being responsible.
Needham, who was just 19 when her son vanished, has never accepted this account, long describing it as a point of frustration that many people believe it.
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She has instead pointed to a tip passed to Ben’s grandfather, Eddie, by a Greek man who said the family should look into the traveler community and claimed there was “a gang, a line” involved in children being “sold for illegal adoption.”
The same man said that Ben’s blonde hair and blue eyes meant he would “fetch more money” among the traffickers. Although the idea initially sounded impossible to her, it prompted Needham to look into the possibility of trafficking.
South Yorkshire Police has remained open to exploring the theory, though Needham does not believe Greek authorities ever pursued it seriously.
She has also referenced claims made years later by two former Kos police officers who allegedly told journalists they had information indicating Ben had been “taken off the island” via a port shortly after he disappeared. Needham said this line of inquiry was never sufficiently investigated.
Over the years, Needham has devoted much of her time to researching child trafficking in Southeast Europe.
She quickly learned that trafficking was more present in Greece from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Needham was a teenager when she moved from Sheffield in England to the Greek village of Iraklis in the summer of 1991, joining her parents who were already living there and hoping to relocate with her son permanently. On the day Ben disappeared, she had left him in the care of his grandparents while she went to work at a hotel. Relatives later realized the toddler had vanished at around 2:30 p.m.
After searching for two hours, they assumed he was with his uncle Stephen, who had been helping with renovation work at the farmhouse. But Stephen was found alone at the family apartment, and Ben was not with him.
Greek police were contacted, and Ben’s grandmother informed Needham later that night. At first, the family believed he would simply be found. They considered the possibility that someone may have taken him indoors because of the summer heat, and that he might later be handed to a police station or hospital if he was dehydrated.
Needham, who now lives in Turkey, has said she cannot pinpoint when the possibility of abduction first became clear to them.
South Yorkshire Police are set to assess whether the man who has come forward could be Ben once DNA testing is carried out.
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