A child goes missing ‘every day,’ police says
A child disappears in Greece every day and 97 minors are currently missing, including 23 victims of abduction, according to statistics of the Greek Police made public during a joint press conference with the Hamogelo Tou Paidiou (Child’s Smile) charity in Athens on Thursday.
In the first four months of this year, 138 children disappeared, Antonis Papantonis, a spokesman for the force’s missing persons unit, told the press conference, adding that 90 of those children have since been found.
More than double the number of reported cases of missing children relate to girls, Papantonis said.
Hamogelo Tou Paidiou, which has worked closely with the police in recent years, said it received 41 requests to help with searches of missing children in the first four months of 2013. Of these, 80 percent involved teenagers running off and only 10 percent were “worrying disappearances of minors,” according to the charity.
