Maastricht police hunting for the remains of an 18-year-old health sciences student who disappeared in 1993 have failed to find any traces of her body in a grave which they reopened on Wednesday.

The grave had been newly dug at the time of Tanja Groen’s disappearance and ‘there was a burial in it on September 1,’ the public prosecution department said ahead of the search.

Early on Wednesday evening, police reported that they had found nothing untoward in the grave. ‘We are extremely disappointed,’ cold case team spokesman Bob Willemsen said.

Tanja Groen vanished on August 31 on her way home from a party at the Circumflex student society in the southern Dutch town. She left the party around midnight to cycle home to her lodgings in Gronsveld but was never seen again.