Fears grow for missing Briton

Nearly a month after the disappearance in Portugal of a talented young London advertising executive, hopes of finding him alive are beginning to fade.

Christopher Bailey, 22, went missing after he left a bar in the fashionable resort of Praia de Luz in the Algarve to walk to his parents' luxury villa a mile away.

His T-shirt and expensive watch - a 21st birthday present - are the only clues to have been found so far.

Today his mother, Janet, said in Portugal: "He just vanished off the face of the earth as if he had been abducted by aliens."

A series of searches by hundreds of locals, a massive poster campaign and an air search by a local microlight pilot have failed to find Mr Bailey, who until recently worked for the GMBM agency in Charing Cross Road.

The extraordinary feature of his disappearance is that he was with two friends on the short walk to the villa at 4am when they realised he was no longer with them. Don Gatfield, 23 and Jamie McDonald, 22, assumed he had either gone on ahead or would soon catch up with them, but they never saw him again.

All three were due to fly home the following day. Although they had been drinking heavily they were not incapable.

"There was no prior warning or anything," said Mrs Bailey. "Our only hope, with no body found, is that he perhaps had a breakdown or something and will turn up after he has sorted his head out. But I have to say that to go off like that would be completely out of character for him.

"This is the worst thing that has ever happened to us. It is so strange and bizarre. Every little bar or caf? we go into to ask, we find people who have heard about him.

"The countryside is rugged round here and at first we thought there are plenty of places he could have fallen and become trapped. But no body has been found after all this time."

Her son, who had a wide circle of friends, had been made redundant from the job he loved following the post-11 September business downturn but had not appeared unduly depressed about it and was actively seeking new work.

He had been staying at the family's four-bedroom villa helping to paint it for the summer letting season which has just started. He had gone into the centre of Praia de Luz for a last night out with his friends before they all came home to Britain.

Why he should have taken off his watch and T-shirt is a mystery. Several days after he went missing a driver came forward who saw a man in white jeans - almost certainly Mr Bailey - wearing no shirt on the road to the villa that night. His bank and cash cards have not been found but neither have they been used since the night he disappeared.

A Foreign Office spokesman said today: "The consul in Portimao in Portugal was informed on 26 April that Christopher Bailey was missing. We have checked local hospitals and kept in touch with his family but the search operation is a matter for the Portuguese police.

"There have been police sweeps of the area but to date there is no news of him or any clues as to what may have happened to him."

Mrs Bailey flew out to Portugal immediately she heard her son was missing but after nearly four weeks she now feels there is little more she can do. She is preparing to return home to Hayling Island, Hants at the end of the week.

A 27-year-old Portuguese married woman vanished from her home in the town of Portimao, 30 miles from Praia de Luz, at around the same time but police are not linking the two disappearances at this stage.

Police also want to contact a British man called Colin Stansfield who turned up locally at around the time Mr Bailey vanished, claiming to have lost all his personal documents to muggers.

Mr Stansfield, an actor in his fifties, obtained a temporary passport from the British authorities in Portugal and then disappeared.