Hannah Graham missing: Police find human remains in search for British-born student

Forensic tests will now determine whether body is that of teenager

Hannah Graham UVA student has been missing since 13 September (Reuters)

Police in the US have found human remains they say could be those of a British-born student who went missing five weeks ago.

Forensic tests will now be conducted to confirm whether the body is that of Hannah Graham, 18, who has not been seen since 13 September.

Virgina state police said the body was found on an abandoned property by a search team in southern Albemarle County.

Charlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, said the discovery was made by Chesterfield County Sheriff’s department just before noon yesterday. Longo told reporters at a press briefing: “forensic tests need to be conducted to determine the identification of those remains.”

Longo added: “This investigation is complicated, it’s a complex criminal investigation, it’s unlikely that we’ll have any information in the very near future that we’ll be able to share with you.”

Graham, a University of Virginia student was last seen with 32-year-old suspect Jesse Leroy Matthew, who has been charged with abduction with intent to defile. He was named on 20 September in connection with Graham’s disappearance by Chief Longo.

A week after she went missing, police released a description of the suspect without naming him, and searched his flat. Matthew was seen on CCTV footage, released by police, where he is seen following and approaching Graham as she walked along Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, east of the university campus.

Virginia State Police then announced that there was a “forensic link” to the 2009 killing of 20-year-old student Morgan Harrington, whose body was found three months after she disappeared.

That case had in turn been linked to a 2012 case of rape in Fairfax, Virginia, the FBI has said. Following the arrest of Matthew, Christopher Newport University, also in Virginia, released a statement saying that he was named in a police file involving a sexual assault in 2003 that took place on their campus. Matthew was a student there from January 2003 to October 2003.

He had been to CNU transferred from Liberty University, where he had studied for three years, and where he had been accused of rape on campus. The charge was dropped after the person declined to move forward with the prosecution, the Lynchburg Commonwealth’s attorney Michael Doucette, said.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press