A woman whose teenage daughter vanished more than four years ago says she has now accepted her child is dead.

Deirdre Fenech has had no contact from her daughter Carmel, who disappeared aged 16, despite media appeals.

Only now is Deirdre, of Moyne Road, Broadfield, Crawley, prepared to accept she will never see her daughter again after police told her it was highly likely she had been killed.

Ms Fenech, 46, said: "The only hope I have left is she will be found and I can bring her home and bury her with my mum.

"The one hope I have is they will find out what happened to her and who is responsible."

Carmel, who would now be 21, vanished after a court appearance at Camberwell Magistrates Court in London in June 1998.

She had gone from being a happy-go-lucky schoolgirl to a crack cocaine addict after falling in with drug dealers.

Ms Fenech, who had lived all her life in London, eventually moved her family to Crawley in 1997 to get Carmel off the drugs.

She said: "She just started staying out and not coming home. You don't think it's down to drugs."

Ms Fenech recalled an incident where Carmel was arrested and taken to court and how shocked she was at her daughter's appearance. It prompted her to make an impassioned plea to the magistrate.

She said: "She was wearing a black pair of cycling shorts several sizes too big and a T-shirt.

"She looked thin. I looked at her and started crying. I said to her, 'I love you too much to sit back and watch you keep doing this to yourself'."

She begged the magistrate to help and he agreed to send her to a secure unit in Crawley. But before she even got there Carmel fled to London. During that time she phoned her mother - it was the last time she ever spoke to her.

Ms Fenech said: "I told her I loved her and said she was breaking my heart living like this. Soon after I got a phone call telling me she had been picked up and was up in court in London. I couldn't get there in time."

She has not been seen since.

Ms Fenech had always believed there might be a small chance Carmel was alive until she received a call from Detective Chief Inspector John Levett, of Sussex Police, who said her daughter might be dead.

Deirdre and her two younger children, David, 14, and Casey, 11, are now trying to come to terms with Carmel's likely death.