Police on Monday will begin preparing to dig up land on a farm in Koekange in Drenthe in their hunt for a 15-year-old girl who disappeared in 1992.

Parts of the farm were searched eight years ago during a previous attempt to solve the disappearance, but the area now earmarked for digging was untouched at that time, the Telegraaf reports.

Radar has indicated the ground now indicated for the search may have been disturbed, the paper said.

Willeke Dost was living with a foster family on the farm but had told friends she wanted to get away. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was a baby.

In particular, she was said to be afraid of her foster brother Bert and foster father Piet, and claimed she was being spied on. According to a television programme in 2004, she had confided to a friend that she was pregnant.

Bike

According to the family, Willeke cycled away from the farmhouse in January 1992, but there were no other witnesses who saw her. The public prosecution department first treated the case as a disappearance rather than a serious crime but reopened it as a cold case in 2009.

In 2010, the girl’s foster mother and her 38-year-old son were arrested in connection with the disappearance and the farm and grounds were searched, but nothing was found and they were released.

Piet M had died by that time, but always denied any involvement in Willeke’s vanishing.