BRITAIN: The families of missing English schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman came together yesterday in an emotional prayer service - exactly one week after the girls disappeared.
Kevin and Nicola Wells and their family were sat just inches away from Leslie and Sharon Chapman as their parish vicar described the "living nightmare" the families were enduring.
The strain was plain to see on their faces, and on those of Jessica's older sisters Rebecca (16), and Alison (14), as they held each other during the Communion service at their church in Soham, Cambridgeshire.
The two sets of parents arrived separately, each surrounded by members of their extended families, but sat just a pew apart, metres away from the pictures of the girls which hang in the church, where hundreds of well-wishers have lit candles. Outside the church the police search for the two girls continued, with officers widening the radius of the physical hunt to a three-mile distance from the town. Extra officers have been drafted in and scores have been manning the phone lines, with more than 500 calls received since Saturday night's reconstruction.
More than 7,500 people have contacted police since the investigation began and last night detectives were trying to get more information through stop-checks they were holding on the town's roads.
Det Chief Insp Andy Hebb admitted it was "disappointing" they had not found the girls - but insisted they still believed they were alive. "There's disappointment that we haven't found them and returned them to their parents already. We can only guess at the pain they're going through," he said.
He said police were checking all reports of suspicious activity in the area, and were working to trace the 266 people identified as high-risk offenders in Cambridgeshire. "You could hypothesise a situation either where they were enticed into a vehicle or where one of them knew the person inside, but we have no evidence on that," he said.
There was still "the potential" that the girls had been groomed by an abductor, Mr Hebb added, but said an opportunistic abduction seemed more likely. Holly's computer has been scrutinised and detectives have said there is no sign the girls were contacting anyone via chatrooms.