Police search for clues in home and garden of missing schoolgirl Milly

Police officers returned yesterday to search the home of the missing schoolgirl Amanda Dowler to try to unearth some clue to her disappearance.

Surrey police said the search of the home and gardens by 26 officers was "routine" after a week in which there has been little indication of how she went missing during a 15-minute walk to her home.

The search was carried out yesterday after her parents left the four-bedroom home at Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, to make an appeal on the BBC's Crimewatch programme. Following a reconstruction of the minutes around the last sighting of the girl, one caller contacted the programme to say they may have found her purse. Superintendent Alan Sharp, who is leading the investigation, said: "That is obviously a significant lead which we will follow up."

Officers were pursuing several potential leads after 230 people contacted the programme. No strong leads had emerged from the thousand calls that the police had received in the week since her disappearance.

Amanda, known as Milly, was last seen walking home from the train station in Walton-on-Thames eight days ago. There have been no positive sightings of her since and none of her possessions, including her mobile phone and a beige rucksack, have been discovered, despite searches of fields, ditches and waterways.

Making an appeal on the programme, Sally Dowler, Amanda's mother, said: "It's been absolutely awful, we're absolutely devastated. Please give her back to us."

Asked about what if the worst had happened, she addressed her daughter's possible abductor and said: "Can you give us some sort of signal what has happened so that we know and can move on?"

Police said yesterday that Mrs Dowler, 42, a teacher, and her husband Robert, 50, an IT consultant, were not being treated as suspects. After cordoning off the area around their home, officers were seen with spades and investigators brought out items in several boxes from the house.

Mr Sharp said the schoolgirl could be anywhere, but the search yesterday concentrated on the area between the railway station, her home and Hersham station. Officers were continuing to pick through allotments, gardens, streams and culverts.

However, Mr Sharp said that the house "remains the most fertile ground for possible clues as to where Amanda may be or why she has disappeared. The search is with the full and free consent of Mr and Mrs Dowler and none of the family are suspects in this investigation."

Detectives from the Sarah Payne murder investigation have been drafted in to advise officers in the search. Sarah, eight, whose paedophile killer Roy Whiting was jailed for life last year, grew up in Hersham, within miles of the Dowlers.

Officers spent yesterday interviewing passengers getting on and off trains at the station in Walton-on-Thames. Door-to-door inquiries also continued and a police helicopter took aerial shots for a second day in the hope of indicating significant places to search.

Police have insisted they have not given up hope of finding Amanda alive and are still keeping an open mind as to her disappearance.