Lord Lucan? It's my friend Barry!

Claims that Lord Lucan had finally been tracked down were dismissed today.

"Jungle Barry", the man named as the fugitive earl in a new book, was in fact an unemployed busker from Lancashire who took to the hippie trail and died in Goa seven years ago.

Today, friends of Barry Halpin revealed how relatives had held a memorial service for him after his death.

They laughed off suggestions that he could have been the runaway aristocrat-who fled Britain nearly 30 years ago after battering his nanny to death.

Fellow busker Tim Hingston, speaking from his home in Australia, said of Halpin: "He was my friend. Basically he lived on the edge of society.

He was a man of the road, a heavy drinker and hard liver but certainly not at all aristocratic, and certainly not Lord Lucan."

Halpin was born on 11 March, 1938, in St Helens, the son of a van driver called William Halpin.

After spending time learning Gaelic folk music on the west coast of Ireland, he left the British Isles in the Seventies to go on the hippie trail and lived for three years in Perth Western Australia, before settling down to an alchohol-fuelled existence on a beach in Goa.

Earlier today Lord Lucan's wife denounced as "utterly absurd" claims by a former Scotland Yard detective that he had unearthed proof that the missing peer lived his last 20 years in India.

Lady Lucan, whose husband's disappearance in 1974 after the murder of their children's nanny sparked a massive police search, dismissed photographs said to be of the runaway earl in his dotage.

The claims come in a new book, published today by a former drug squad detective, Duncan MacLaughlin.

He claims he was alerted to the fate of Lord Lucan by a smalltime former drug dealer who claimed to have met the peer in the resort of Goa on India's west coast.

But Lady Lucan insists her husband had been dead for years. "It is just absurd," she told the Standard. "There is no way there is any truth in this.

This afternoon, it emerged that when Barry Halpin died, his sisters Rita and Mildred held a small memorial for him in St Helens and put an obituary notice for him in the local paper. It read: "Halpin, Barry Thomas. Late of St Helens, died Jan 3 1996 in Goa, India, Dearly loved brother of Rita and Mildred."

Mr Hingston, 47, said: "There is no way he was Lord Lucan. He was an hippie trail traveller from St Helens and whilst I'm not English, his was in no way an aristrocratic accent. He talked about a sister in St Helens, having posessions at her house in St Helens and having spent time in Ireland.

"Basically Barry had been on the hippie trail for years. He'd been in Goa for a while then arrived in Perth in 1976 to try and save up some money before going out to Goa again to start up a small business or hotel on the beach. He said he'd walked to Goa from Bombay, which I could believe because he was immensely fit then and could walk for miles.

"I met him one night at a folk club called the Stables, which was a disued stables that we turned into a club on wednmesday night.

"He was about 38, tanned, very healthy looking with this great big beard and long hair. He was quite something to see and very charismatic.

"He didn't talk much about his past but he wasn't Lord Lucan, I spent every day with him for a long time, having music lessons in the morning and then going into Perth to busk in Hay Street Mall every afternoon. We used to do that for pretty much three years until my first child was born. We were as close as it was possible to be as friends in fact I spent more time with him then than my wife. He was not Lord Lucan I can assure you.

"He used to live in a tiny two bedroom rental house in Leederville. He had no possessions, Barry used to sleep on a mattress on the floor.

"He lived like that for three years. Gentlemanly and a fine man, easy to like, but not Lord Lucan."

Mr MacLaughlin's book, Dead Lucky - Lord Lucan: The Final Truth, alleges that the peer settled in 1975 in a hippie commune in the Goan shanty town of Ximera, where he lived until his death in 1996 of cirrhosis of the liver. He was known as Jungle Barry because of his frequent expeditions into the local jungle.