LONDON, Aug 10: Police fear that two British schoolgirls who disappeared last week may have been lured from their homes by an online paedophile posing as a teenager on the Internet.

But police said on Saturday that two men arrested for failing to cooperate with the investigation into the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were not accused of playing a direct role in the suspected abduction.

“At this stage I do not consider this to be a significant development,” Inspector David Beck said.

The two men — one in his 30s arrested on Friday and a second in his 40s arrested overnight on Friday — were being questioned separately at two police stations in Cambridgeshire in eastern England, not far from where the two young friends went missing last Sunday.

The two 10-year-old girls from the sleepy English town of Soham, 30 kilometres northeast of Cambridge, have become the focus of a major police search.

Police originally thought they had run away on a lark, but have now shifted their focus to the possibility that they had been kidnapped, possibly by a paedophile.

Police have confirmed that the two girls used Wells’ computer for 24 minutes just one hour before they disappeared.

“We have now done some further analysis of the computer equipment used within the 20 or so minutes prior to their disappearance,” an official said.—AFP