A new nine-part podcast series investigates the disappearance of eight-year-old Vishal Mehrotra.
On 29 July 1981, the day of the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, Vishal disappeared on his way home from the celebrations.
Despite a huge police search, he was never seen alive again. Seven months later, his partial remains were discovered in a small patch of woodland in rural Sussex, many miles from home.
Forty years on, even though new evidence emerged, no-one has been brought to justice for the abduction and death of Vishal as the police appear to have exhausted all their leads.
Then, as the world was going into lockdown in 2020, a BBC local reporter received a secretive message from a person who has worked in the police, who told him they’d seen something extraordinary that could blow the case wide open.
The podcast has been three years in the making and as its team investigate, they track down and question a convicted paedophile, a teacher who fled the UK while being questioned by police in relation to child sexual abuse in the 1990s and has been on the run across the world for over 25 years.
Most shocking of all, the series discovers that a UK police force had been aware for years he’d been at the address and had decided not to try to bring him back – while telling Vishal’s family that he hadn’t been located.
In the podcast series, Vishal’s 30-year-old half-brother Suchin Mehrotra and investigative reporter Colin Campbell try to gather the pieces to get answers.
What they uncover takes them deep into the disturbing underworld of what appears to be a completely separate crime as they travel halfway across the globe in a search for the truth.
Investigative journalist Colin Campbell says: “The Vishal Mehrotra case is a heart-breaking tragedy, and it was essential to provide more answers to his family.”
Vishal will be available on BBC Sounds and wherever you get your podcasts from 17 April.
