In 1991, little Ben Needham disappeared while on holiday in Greece at the age of 21 months. In 2022, a child’s corpse floats in the Danube. And Ben’s mother, Kerry Needham from England, wants to know: Is this her boy?
In the case of the boy, who was found wrapped in plastic wrap and weighed down with a paving stone in the Danube in 2022, it was the first tip to reach the public. Now it is clear: the boy from the Danube was not called Ben Needham. A DNA sample came to this conclusion, as a police spokesman told the SZ.
Kerry Needham’s tip caused a stir first in England and then in Germany. He couldn’t help clarify the situation, but tells of a mother’s desperate search for her son.
For 32 years, Kerry Needham, 51, has been pursuing every lead that could explain why her son simply disappeared on the Greek island of Kos in 1991. Her circle of supporters alerted her to Interpol’s international manhunt for the boy in the Danube, and Needham discovered similarities between the reconstruction made of the body and her son Ben. That’s what she told British tabloids. However, she also said that she sees them in many little boys.
She also spoke of a possible connection to Germany. Already in Greece, a stranger told Ben’s grandfather: “Your grandson was kidnapped to be sold. He is blonde and blue-eyed.” The mother also remembers a prisoner who said in 1996 that he had seen Ben with a “gypsy family” in Greece who also looked after his child. The inmate responded to a program that brings families together and Ben’s grandparents took part. According to British newspaper reports, he said that Ben was with one of his relatives in Germany. There was even supposedly a date for the child to be handed over, but no one showed up.
Even before the DNA sample provided certainty, there were many doubts that Ben Needham and the boy from the Danube were really the same child. According to the Upper Bavaria North police, the boy found is said to be between three and seven years old. Ben Needham would have had to have died in 1996 at the latest, and the body would have had to have been preserved for years before being let into the Danube. “Any madness is possible,” said Andreas Aichele from the Upper Bavaria North police about this theory, but it was very unlikely even before the DNA sample. Also because the paving stone with which the corpse was weighed down comes from a current production and was not made years ago.
A child fell through the cracks here
Now the investigators in Ingolstadt are once again faced with hundreds of clues that they have to follow up on. It is the police work that is not shown on TV in “Tatort” and which Aichele describes as: “meticulous, stubborn, precise, meticulous processing of traces in all directions.”
There is, for example, the question of origin. Interpol says the boy is almost certainly not from Germany. Andreas Aichele puts this a little more cautiously. He says: “He probably didn’t grow up in classic German circumstances.” That means: A child fell through the cracks here. The boy almost certainly did not go to a kindergarten or have any examinations at the pediatrician. But perhaps a refugee child living in Germany who is not registered? Possible. As many things are possible. There is, for example, an isotope report that allows conclusions to be drawn about the environmental influences to which the boy was exposed: “Even in Berlin, an Asian can eat the same diet as in Vietnam,” says Aichele.
Interpol’s search received 33 tips, not all of which appear to be useful. Aichele speaks of a mid-double-digit sum that should be taken seriously. But they don’t have a hot lead right now. The case has been at the top of their list for a year and a half. And he will stay there “until we really know 100 percent that the trail is dead.”