Inquiry seeks car seen at Cleo Smith site

A reported sighting of a car driving away from the site around the time she was believed to have been abducted is now the focus.

Police believe Cleo Smith was abducted. Picture: Instagram

The investigation into the disappearance of four-year-old girl Cleo Smith from a remote campsite in northwest Western Australia is focusing on the reported sighting of a car driving away from the site around the time she was believed to have been abducted.

Detective Superintendent Rod Wilde on Sunday revealed that two people travelling north towards Karratha in the early hours of October 16 had told police they had seen a passenger vehicle turning out of the road between the North West Coastal Highway and the Blowholes campground where Cleo was staying. The mystery vehicle was seen turning south towards Carnarvon.

The sighting at the turn-off was around 3am to 3.30am on the 16th. The girl’s mother, Ellie Smith, had previously told how she last saw Cleo around 1.30am that same morning, when she woke to give Cleo’s baby sister Isla a drink. By 6am, when Ms Smith and her partner Jake Gliddon woke up, Cleo was gone.

“We want to speak to the driver or the persons, if there was more than one person in that vehicle, and establish exactly what was going on and what they are doing,” Superintendent Wilde said. “There’s no more than that, they’re not a suspect as such, we just want to establish who they were and what they were doing at that time.” The reported sighting is the biggest potential breakthrough made public by police since they confirmed their belief that Cleo had been abducted.

Superintendent Wilde did not disclose any other information about the vehicle, saying he did not want to narrow it down to a particular class of car.

“We don’t believe it’s a truck or any large vehicle, we believe it’s a smaller vehicle which will probably be a passenger vehicle,” he said.

The reported sighting followed a call from police on Friday for the public to hand over all CCTV and dashcam footage recorded within a 1000km radius of the Blowholes over the weekend of Cleo’s disappearance.

Police also spent the weekend searching Cleo’s family home in Carnarvon, around 75km from the Blowholes campground, for any sign that the girl may have been stalked in the lead-up to her potential abduction. Superintendent Wilde said the search of the family home was standard for such an investigation.

“There’s no evidence, there’s no information that Cleo was stalked at all,” he said.

“Police in a major investigation, one of the things that we’ll do is that we’ll go there to cover all those bases and be thorough in the investigation.”

He said a motion sensor-activated camera at one of the campground’s shacks had been activated on the Friday evening, when Cleo and her family arrived, and had captured what police believe was Cleo’s voice.

A $1m reward has been offered for any information that leads to Cleo being found.