Police in Cambridgeshire have made a dramatic direct appeal to the presumed abductor of two 10-year-old girls to call them on a special telephone line "so that we can stop this now".
Det Supt David Beck has set a deadline of midnight tomorrow for the kidnapper or kidnappers of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman to call in.
"It is giving these people, if they are more than one, an opportunity to have a one-to-one direct link contact with me," said Det Supt Beck as the hunt for the girls went through its 10th day.
The number was being sent out as a voice mail and a text message to the mobile phone that Jessica was carrying with her.
Appearing on television yesterday evening, a sombre Det Supt Beck told the kidnapper: "Listen to that message. It will tell you how to contact me so that we can stop this now. You do have a way out."
Holly and Jessica vanished on August 4th from their home in Soham, a quiet market town northeast of Cambridge.
They were last seen out walking in Manchester United jerseys, not long after logging onto the Internet at Holly's home.
Det Supt Beck said he still believed the girls were alive, after a painstaking overnight search in a nearby woods - where a jogger found what appeared to be shallow graves - turned up nothing.
"There are still two girls out there who I believe to be alive," he said.
News that nothing was unearthed on Tuesday in Warren Hill - a rambling woods popular with racehorse trainers 15 km south-east of Soham - renewed hopes for their families and police.
Six police officers made one final sweep of the area yesterday as investigators concluded that the fresh mounds of earth in the woods were probably the work of tunnelling badgers.
"We were frustrated at the length of time it took," the Chapman family said in a statement released through police, who announced a town meeting for today to review the case with local residents.
"Then, in the early hours of the morning, came the immense relief with the news that it was not them," the Chapmans said. "But the questions start again: Where are they?"
On Tuesday, attention was focused on a Cambridge taxi-driver's claim that he had seen a dark green car in the Soham area on the night of the girls' disappearance being driven erratically with two children inside.
But police yesterday cast doubt on his claim, saying that a mobile phone call by one of the taxi-driver's passengers was made one hour before the girls vanished.
Some 320 police officers and civilians from all over Britain have been tackling the case, and more than 400 house-to-house inquiries have been carried out.- (AFP)