Age-enhanced photos of missing young people to be posted on website

AGE-ENHANCED photographs of missing young people will be posted on a new website set up by the gardaí but linked to an internationally renowned centre that tracks disappeared children.

Staff at the National Missing Persons Bureau recently completed age progression training at the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington.

The staff is working on a number of images of children which will be posted on the new missingkids.ie site. This will be linked to missingkids.com and available in various languages.

It is thought six children missing for a number of years will be featured initially. High-profile cases, such as that of 13-year-old Phillip Cairns, who disappeared nearly 20 years ago, are likely to feature but it will also include suspected parental abduction cases.

Superintendent Kieran Kenny, the bureau chief, said: “We have a number of untraced people. To qualify you must have been under 18 years of age at the time of the disappearance.”

Staff approached families of the missing and, using photographs of the father, mother, brother and sisters, compiled the age progressed images.

Age progression will be one of the items of a major one day conference on the disappeared, which takes place today in Belfast.

The conference, hosted by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, will be attended by senior gardaí, including Superintendent Kenny, representatives of the British National Missing Persons Helpline and Centrex, Britain’s central police training unit.

“Missing Persons - A Joint Approach” is aimed at cementing links between the various agencies in Britain and Ireland.

There has been criticism of the gardaí for their approach to the investigation of missing persons and calls for a dedicated central unit to trace missing persons, most notably from Mary Phelan, the sister of Jo Jo Dullard, who disappeared in 1995.

Missing person cases are investigated at a local level with the bureau providing advice and guidance.

Thousands of people go missing every year but most are found within days.

However, 128 people who had gone missing in the previous five years had still not been located by the end of 2002.