Search for Amy scaled down due to absence of clues

SPANISH police have scaled down their search for missing 15-year-old Dublin girl Amy Fitzpatrick after they failed to uncover any clues following two days of intensive investigations.

Police have not ruled out that she was kidnapped by paedophiles or murdered, or that she could simply have run away after she left a friend’s house late on New Year’s Day.

More than 200 police, Red Cross, civil protection and firemen searched the area around her home and nearby highway and sand dunes.

After six hours the search was called off. Police co-ordinator, Francisco Ortega, said they had already searched the area, but had done so in more detail over the past two days.

“This part of the investigation is complete but if required, we can relaunch an intensive search,” he said.

He said the Civil Guard would continue to investigate the case, but admitted that despite searching scrub land and the many buildings under construction in the area, they had failed to find any clue as to what happened Amy.

Franco Rey, a spokesperson for the family, said they had been informed of the police decision. He said what happened to Amy was wide open and the police were not discounting anything, including that she could have been taken by paedophiles and held against her will.

“They are considering every possibility,” he said.

He denied she was in the habit of hitching lifts with strangers and could have done so on the night she disappeared. Claudine Simpson, the mother of one of Amy’s friends, had earlier said she believed the girl had accepted lifts from strangers in the past and she could have on Tuesday week last.

Mr Rey also insisted Amy’s family were at home on that night and would have been there to let her in when she should have arrived home by 10.30pm at the latest.

Amy’s father, Christopher, and his sister Christine Kenny arrived in Malaga on Wednesday but it was not known if he had met his estranged wife, Audrey yesterday.

Ms Fitzpatrick had contacted several of Amy’s friends and their parents yesterday to ask them not to give any further interviews to the media. At a press conference on Wednesday she had described some of them as “so called friends” and said they were spreading misinformation especially suggesting Amy was a troubled girl who did not get along with her mother and stepfather.