Police involved in William Tyrrell investigation join search for AJ Elfalek

Police haunted by the mistakes made in the first hours after William Tyrrell’s disappearance are taking a different approach in the search for AJ Elfalek.

Police haunted by the mistakes made in the first hours after the disappearance of William Tyrrell are treating the hunt for AJ Elfalek as both a missing persons case and a potential homicide.

Forensic officers were earlier at the family’s remote Upper Hunter home which is being treated as a crime scene as some of the same officers who were involved in the search for William Tyrrell have joined searchers and AJ’s family combing the 256ha property.

Officers involved in the William Tyrrell investigation

have joined searchers for missing AJ

The missing boy's mother Kelly Elfalak joins the search to find AJ. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Peter Lorimer.

Police are reportedly treating the child’s disappearance as a misadventure and not an abduction but stress they are keeping an open mind.

A police source said the forensic examination of their home was no reflection on AJ’s distraught parents but purely because of what was learned through three-year-old William’s disappearance when potential forensic evidence was lost or trampled on as hundreds of people joined the search around his foster family’s Kendall home in September 2014.

The Homicide Squad has not yet been called in although they have been alerted as is the protocol for all missing persons cases.

The brother of missing AJ takes detectives and a film crew on a re-enactment of events leading up to his disappearance on Friday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Peter Lorimer.

Police divers at the rural property. Picture: David Swift

SES volunteers join the search at the weekend. Picture: David Swift

No trace of William, who was last seen playing in his foster grandmother’s yard, has been found.

AJ, who has autism and is non-verbal, was last seen playing on the porch as his mum Kelly said he was only out of her sight for a matter of seconds.

Police are also investigating claims by a family friend, Alan Hashem, that security footage from CCTV cameras from the time AJ disappearance had also gone missing.

Mr Hasham said he had told police that he had installed the security cameras on a post high enough so they could not be easily tampered with.

‘There’s footage missing, unexplained. (We have footage from) days before, days after, but not during the time,” he told the Today show on Monday.

‘You know what’s more alarming? We installed it so high you can’t tamper with it and we had two mechanisms of storage, cloud storage and physical storage and there’s no data in that timeslot.

‘We provided the user name and password to the police, we provided them the actual original memory card. There’s a lot of explaining to do.’

Originally published as Police involved in William Tyrrell investigation join search for AJ Elfalek