‘It’s a very lonely world’: The Brits who go missing abroad
“His room is still the same” and “there’s always a missing chair around the table”, says Pip, whose younger brother Sanjiv Kundi was 41 when he vanished in Paris 11 years ago.
She has visited the French capital many times since he left the family home in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, for a week’s holiday – always wondering if she will see his face in the crowd.
Sanjiv was the “apple of my parents’ eye”, she says, their only son surrounded by four sisters, but he struggled with his mental health in the years before his disappearance.
Distinctive looking, standing at around 6ft 2inch inches tall with dark, greying curly hair and a beard, Sanjiv was wearing glasses, a heavy brown, three-quarter length coat and brown cargo trousers when he took the 4.22pm Eurostar from St Pancras.
He arrived at Gare du Nord station on the evening of 25 September 2013 but what happened next remains a mystery.
Sanjiv Kundi has been missing for 11 years. Pic: Family
He is believed to have returned to the station the following day to buy a ticket home for 1 October but there’s no available CCTV footage, and his cards and mobile phone have not been used since he went missing.
The impact on Sanjiv’s family has been devastating, his parents now in their 80s, his nephews all grown up, are still no closer to getting any answers.
Pip wonders if he’s been a victim of crime, if something sinister has happened to him, or if he’s decided to live that way.
‘Somebody somewhere knows something’
If he has, she wants him to know he’s “deeply missed” and his family just want to know he’s safe – but she does not think he intentionally wanted to go missing.
“In this day and age, with all the technology we have, I can’t understand why nobody saw my brother that day,” says Pip.
“Somebody somewhere knows something.”
Her family is one of the many living with the nightmare of searching for a loved one who has gone missing abroad.
Flowers left by Jay Slater’s family. Pic: Reuters/Jesus Cabrera
The LBT Global charity, which helped Jay Slater’s relatives after he disappeared while on holiday in Tenerife, says it gets about 3,000 enquiries a year and takes on about 300 to 400 of those cases.
But only a fraction get the same type of publicity as the 19-year-old, whose body was found in a ravine 29 days after he went missing, or television doctor Michael Mosley, 67, who was found dead four days after he disappeared on the Greek island of Symi.
Middle-aged men and those with mental health issues tend not to generate the same headlines as the young, photogenic or famous, says Matt Searle, LBT Global’s chief executive.
But the “extraordinary” case of Madeleine McCann, who was aged three when she disappeared from her holiday apartment in Portugal on 3 May 2007, set a “very public benchmark” for what people expect.
‘A missing foreigner is bottom of the pile’
Police in the UK have a duty to take statements and pass the information through Interpol to the relevant foreign police force, but they do not have any jurisdiction to carry out an investigation.
There are currently 69 Interpol yellow notices – the global police alerts issued to help locate people, including cases of suspected kidnappings and abductions – for British people, including Madeleine.
Gerry, left, and Kate McCann, with a picture of their missing daughter Madeleine. Pic: AP
Most families will not get much support from the authorities and in some countries, “a missing foreigner is absolutely bottom of the pile”, says Matt, while those who go out to search themselves may not even be able to read the road signs.
“It’s a very lonely world for people who’ve got someone missing overseas,” he says.
“A huge part of every operation is explaining why the British police, the prime minister, the foreign secretary, aren’t all flying out there,” he says.
“It just doesn’t happen. You have to explain that the British government can’t do that. The Met Police aren’t going to be flying out in helicopters, going to look for them, you know, we’re not going to get any of that.
“But what we do is say, depending on what the case needs, we could try and find a local guy with a drone, mobilise local search and rescue, or fundraise to get on-the-ground support.”
‘We’ve been to the morgues’
Pip’s family has had virtually no contact with the French police and a year after Sanjiv went missing his file was shoved in a drawer, she says, so they were left to drive the search themselves.
She went to areas in Paris that were popular with rough sleepers, handed out leaflets and posters and appeared on French radio and TV.
Ben Needham went missing on Greek island Kos. Pic: PA
“We’ve been to the morgues. We’ve been to the hospital,” she says. “And you can’t believe you still can’t find a scrap of anything to tell us what happened when he left that station.”
Pip has been assisted by the Missing People charity. It says 170,000 people a year, or one every 90 seconds, are reported missing in the UK, but lists the details of just 38 people missing abroad.
They include the high-profile cases of Madeleine McCann and Ben Needham, who was 21 months old when he disappeared on the Greek island of Kos in 1991.
While Sanjiv has attracted some publicity over the years, the coverage of the famous cases sometimes makes Pip think: “Why not my brother?”
Around 80% of cases resolved
LBT Global, which specialises in helping families whose relatives are missing abroad, has around 860 open cases, some going back 20 years.
The charity is able to tell around 80% of the people it works with what happened. Around half of those are happy endings, says Matt.
Alex Batty was reunited with his grandmother after six years. Pic: GMP
Alex Batty went missing aged 11 in 2017 after his mother Melanie Batty, who was not his legal guardian, took him on a pre-arranged trip to Spain with his grandfather.
They lived “off-grid” leading a nomadic lifestyle in southern France for six years until Alex made the decision to walk out and was found walking in darkness carrying his skateboard by a French delivery driver near Toulouse.
He was reunited with his grandmother and legal guardian Susan Caruana at his former home in Oldham, Greater Manchester, just before Christmas last year.
In other cases, a missing person is found in prison overseas or dead.
“Even being able to tell them that someone has died can be a relief for them, because at least they can move on with a grieving journey then, and we can make arrangements to repatriate the body, and they can have a burial,” says Matt.
“And it’s surprising how often a family will say, ‘I wish I knew they were dead rather than just not knowing at all’.”
Harder still, he says, is telling a family they are alive and well but they do not want to speak to them ever again. The reasons for this can vary but typically include a family breakdown, criminal activity within a family or they just want to leave their old life behind.
‘Never lose hope’
In those cases, Matt has to tell the family: “I’m sorry, but we can’t search for them anymore. They told me they don’t want to be found and they don’t want to be in touch.”
But living in long-term limbo like Pip’s family is also incredibly hard.
They have gone through all the stages of bereavement, from shock to denial, to depression and anger at “why isn’t anybody looking for him?”
And when a new high-profile missing person’s case like Jay Slater hits the headlines it “brings it all back”.
“Every person out there whose family member is missing could almost feel and touch the emotion that [family] was going through,” says Pip.
LBT Global’s oldest cases date back to 2004 or 2005 but Matt says his charity has located people who have been missing for more than 20 years.
“The message to families is never lose hope,” he says.
Missing People runs a free and confidential helpline for those affected by a disappearance. You can text or call them on 116 000 or send an email to 11600@missingpeople.org.uk.
Temperatures in a hamlet in northern Scotland fell to -18.7C (-1.66F) overnight – the UK’s coldest January night in 15 years, the Met Office has said.
Altnaharra, in the northern region of the Highlands, reached the lowest temperature while nearby Kinbrace reached -17.9C (-0.22F).
It is the coldest January overnight temperature since 2010, when temperatures dropped below -15C several times at locations across the UK, including -22.3C (-8.14F) on 8 January in Altnaharra.
Forecasters had previously said there was a very small probability it could reach -19C.
A Highland cow grazing near Shotts, North Lanarkshire. Pic: PA
Met Office meteorologist Alex Deakin said: “Friday night into Saturday morning may well be the nadir of this current cold spell.”
Temperatures for large parts of the UK are set to fall again as the cold weather continues.
St Andrew’s church at Kiln Pit in Durham. Pic: PA
Met Office meteorologist Zoe Hutin said: “We’ve still got tonight to come, and tomorrow (Saturday) night could also be chilly as well.
“Temperatures for tomorrow night, it will be mainly eastern parts that see temperatures dropping widely below freezing, so East Anglia, the northeast of England, northern and eastern Scotland as well.
“So another chilly night to come on Saturday, but then as we go into Sunday and into Monday, then we can start to expect temperatures to recover somewhat.
“I won’t rule out the risk of seeing something around or just below freezing again on Sunday night into Monday, but it won’t be quite so dramatic as the temperatures that we’re going to experience as we go overnight tonight.”
Skating on a frozen flooded field in Upware, Cambridgeshire. Pic: PA
On Monday, temperatures are expected to be more in line with the seasonal norm, at about 7C to 8C.
A family walk across Hothfield Common in frosty conditions near Ashford in Kent. Pic: PA
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The freezing conditions have led to travel disruption, with Manchester Airport closing both its runways on Thursday morning because of “significant levels of snow”. They were later reopened.
Transport for Wales closed some railway lines because of damage to tracks.
Hundreds of schools in Scotland and about 90 in Wales were shut on Thursday.
Meanwhile, staff and customers at a pub thought to be Britain’s highest were finally able to leave on Thursday after being snowed in.
The Tan Hill Inn in Richmond, North Yorkshire, is 1,732 feet (528m) above sea level.
Six staff and 23 visitors were stuck, the pub said on Facebook.
Pressure on hospitals is particularly high this winter, with more than a dozen declaring critical incidents in recent days.
Hospitals struggle every winter with additional pressures due to the impact of cold weather, but the early arrival of flu this season and high volume of cases meant Christmas and New Year’s weeks were even busier than usual.
There are currently at least 20 hospitals that have declared critical incidents in England, although this is a fast-moving picture, and some trusts will go into critical incident for as little as half an hour.
The latest NHS winter situation reports give a more detailed look at the level of pressure experienced by individual trusts, including those with the worst ambulance handover delays and highest levels of flu patients.
Ambulance handover delays
When a patient arrives at a hospital in an ambulance, clinical guidelines suggest that it should take no longer than 15 minutes to transfer them into emergency care.
It is now common for handovers to regularly exceed this timeframe, however, when emergency departments are overcrowded and lack the capacity to keep up with new patient arrivals.
This is risky for patients because it delays their assessment and treatment by clinicians, and also reduces the availability of ambulances to respond to new incidents.
The trust with the longest delays was University Hospitals Plymouth, with an average handover time of three hours and 33 minutes over the week – two hours and 40 minutes longer than the average for England. It also recorded the longest average handover times for a single day, at five hours and 14 minutes on New Year’s Day.
Use the table below to search for local ambulance handover times:
On 7 January, University Hospitals Plymouth declared a critical incident at Derriford Hospital due to “significant and rising demand for hospital care”, though this has since been stood down.
The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust had an average ambulance handover time of three hours and 15 minutes, increasing by more than an hour from one hour and 51 minutes the week before.
In Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, 83% of handovers took more than 30 minutes, the highest share among areas dealing with more than five ambulance arrivals per day.
This area also recently declared and then stood down a critical incident.
In total across England, 43 trusts out of 127 had average handover times of more than an hour, while nine areas had average handover times of more than two hours.
Flu
This winter’s flu wave arrived earlier than usual and has hit health services hard.
Over New Year’s week, there were 5,407 flu patients in hospitals in England on average each day, more than three times higher than during the same week last year and increasing by 20% from the week before.
The worst impacted trusts were Northumbria Healthcare and University Hospitals Birmingham, with 15% and 13% of all available beds occupied by flu patients respectively in the latest week.
Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust had among the biggest increase in flu patients from the previous week, more than doubling from 18 to 42 patients per day on average.
Use the table below to search for local flu hospitalisations:
There are some indications that flu activity may have now peaked, with national flu surveillance showing a decrease in positive flu tests in the latest week, though activity remains at high levels.
Bed occupancy
Current NHS guidance is that a maximum of 92% of hospital beds should be occupied to reduce negative risks associated with overfilled beds.
These risks include the impact on patient flow resulting from it being more difficult to find beds for patients, and negative impacts on performance and waiting times, as well as being linked to increased infection rates.
In the week to 5 January, 92.8% of 102,546 open hospital beds were available each day on average, not far off the recommended level.
However, bed occupancy was very high in some trusts, with more than 95% of beds occupied in 43 trusts on average over the week.
The trust with the highest rate of bed occupancy was Wye Valley NHS Trust, with 99.9% of 332 beds occupied on average throughout the week.
There was only one day when beds weren’t fully occupied, on 3 January, when two beds of 322 were available.
Use the table below to search for local bed occupancy:
Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust recorded bed occupancy of 98.5% over the week. This trust declared a critical incident on 8 January.
Part of the problem for bed availability is prolonged hospital stays – also known as bed-blocking.
This is often linked to pressures in other parts of the health and social care system, for example when patients can’t be discharged to appropriate social care providers even though they are ready to leave hospital.
Just under half of beds occupied by patients in English hospitals last week were occupied by long-stay patients who had been there for seven or more days.
In seven trusts, at least three in five beds were occupied by long-stay patients, while in Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust the figure was more than four in five beds.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
The government contract for the controversial asylum barge in Dorset has ended.
The last asylum seekers are believed to have left Bibby Stockholm at the end of November after Labour said it would have cost more than £20m to run in 2025.
Its closure this month was expected, and on Friday the management firm and the Home Office confirmed to Sky News the contract had now expired.
It’s currently unclear when Bibby Stockholm will leave Portland and what it will be used for next.
The Conservative government started using the vessel in August 2023.
It said putting nearly 500 men on board while they waited for an asylum decision was cheaper than paying for hotel rooms.
However, it was controversial from the start and sparked legal challenges and protests.
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August: 2023: Barge reminds migrant of Islamic State
Days after the first group boarded there was an outbreak of Legionella bacteria in the water system and it had to be evacuated for two months.
In December 2023, an Albanian asylum seeker, Leonard Farruku, died on board.
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A Home Office spokesperson said the government was determined to reform the asylum system to make it operate “swiftly, firmly and fairly”.
“This includes our accommodation sites, as we continue to identify a range of options to reduce the use of hotels,” the new statement added.
“We are already closing some hotels and will continue to engage with local authorities and key stakeholders as part of this process.”
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