While most of the people reported to the police as missing turn up within a short space of time, 1,497 people are listed in Dutch official files as having disappeared without trace, the Volkskrant reported at the weekend.

The report was compiled by the Beke crime research bureau and, for the first time, give the authorities a clear picture of how many people have gone missing for more than a year.

The researchers looked into nearly 18,500 files compiled between 1929 and 2013 and contained in five different databases.

They found almost half the people listed as missing were not born in the Netherlands and 25% were asylum seekers who had vanished. A large number of these are under-age asylum seekers who came to the Netherlands between 2000 and 2005 and disappeared from refugee centres.

Many young refugees used the Netherlands as a transit country but ‘we cannot rule out that they were the victims of human traffickers,’ Beke researcher Ilse van Leiden told the paper.

Crime

The researchers say around 10% of the total is made up of people who disappeared while travelling – usually adult men, 6% are runaways and 7% may have been kidnapped. Most of these are children who have been taken out of the Netherlands by a parent.

But in 639 of the 1,497 cases there is no indication at all of what may have happened to the individual and their disappearance cannot be categorised. In just 50 cases, a crime is likely to be behind the disappearance, the researchers say.

The police will use the new register to re-examine old cases, police chief Ruud Bik said. ‘We are going to look into them step by step,’ he said. ‘Sometimes there will be a trigger for a new investigation, such as the last place a person was seen.’