Mum of Ben Needham clings to hope he's still alive 30 years after he vanished
Police say it is still their “professional belief” that Ben died when a digger driver accidentally ran over him. Kerry said: “There is no forensic evidence to back up their theory, only what this witness told South Yorkshire Police.”
She said the family had initially accepted the digger accident theory. Kerry said: “When we were told that information we were traumatised and we believed what the police were saying.
“We tried to accept it and grieve and rebuild after that trauma. But in 2018 when they extracted the DNA and it wasn’t Ben’s, I started questioning the theory. Things don’t add up.”
Covid has prevented her from going ahead with a plan to return to Kos to make an appeal to the Greek public and meet the witness face-to-face.
She said: “I want to know everything he said and everything he knows. You can’t keep a secret like that for 25 years and suddenly open up, give all this information to the police and then clam up again.”
Kerry was told the witness, a business partner of Barkas, claimed to have seen Ben playing on a mound of soil in the morning of his disappearance while the adults were inside.
The next day he met Barkas, who told the witness that he feared he may have run the boy over.
Kerry said: “I don’t know why he is claiming he saw Ben there in the morning because my mum didn’t walk up there with him until about 12.45am.
“If he is wrong about that, what else is he wrong about in his statement?