Police expand search area for missing teen 
as suspect quizzed

Police divers were yesterday
taking combing the west London waterway where the schoolgirl, 14, was last spotted 12 days ago.

A sniffer dog was checking a red dinghy on the Grand Union Canal in Hanwell, while around a dozen police officers were stationed in the area.

The Metropolitan Police’s expansion of their search follows the arrest on Saturday afternoon of a 25-year-old man on suspicion of killing the vulnerable teen, who suffers from anorexia.

Alice was last seen by her family at 1pm on August 28, when she left her home in Hanwell but failed to return home.

Police swooped on the man in Ealing, west London, after receiving fresh information. It came after they released new pictures of cyclists riding past the spot where the teenager was last seen moments before her disappearance.

The grainy images show three cyclists riding along the towpath by the Trumpers Way Canal Bridge in Hanwell, just before Alice walks past at 4.23pm.

They are followed by two more cyclists who pass under the bridge.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “All lines of enquiry are still open at this time and this remains a missing person investigation at this stage.”

He confirmed police had broadened the area they were searching, but refused to discuss where it had been expanded from, or to.

Police have trawled through hundreds of hours of CCTV footage and carried out “extensive” searches using specialist officers in the hunt for the missing schoolgirl.

Alice is white, 5ft 2in, very slim and with shoulder-length, light brown hair.

She was last seen wearing dark blue jeans and a dark green lacy cardigan and carrying a dark rucksack, which was recovered earlier this week. She may have been wearing denim blue Vans shoes and tartan-framed spectacles.

Police said they were “especially concerned” as Alice has not been well recently.

Earlier this week Alice’s mother, Rosalind Hodgkiss, issued an emotional appeal to help find her daughter. She said: “We miss her, that we love her and that she’s not in any trouble, and we want to know that she’s safe. We just want her to come home.”