Missing Indigenous Girl in Australia Is Found Dead After 5-Day Search | UNW

For five days, Australian police officers scoured the outback surrounding a rural Indigenous town in the country’s far north, hoping to find a five-year-old girl who had last been seen with a man released from prison just days before.

Dozens of volunteers combed through dense and rough bush where, in some places, the grass was more than three feet tall and the vegetation was so thick that members of the search team could not see each other’s ankles.

On Thursday, Police Commissioner Martin Dole of the Northern Territory confirmed the “worst possible outcome.”

The authorities had found a body they believed to be that of the girl, Commissioner Dole said. The police, referring to her as Kumanjayi Little Baby per her family’s request and Indigenous customs, said the body was just more than three miles south of where she had last been seen on Saturday night in Old Timers Aboriginal Town Camp, south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

Commissioner Dole did not provide further details on how or when Kumanjayi Little Baby died. She was nonverbal and communicated with hand gestures, local media reported.

Kumanjayi Little Baby’s mother, who was not named, said in a statement that she loved and missed her daughter and knew she was in heaven.

“It is going to be so hard to live the rest of our lives without you,” her mother said, adding, “Me and your brother will meet you one day.”

Kumanjayi Little Baby and her mother were at the camp on Saturday, which is home to about 40 people, to do laundry and because they knew people in the area, the police said.

The authorities are searching for a man who was seen holding hands with the girl late on Saturday night and who they believe abducted her. They identified the suspect as Jefferson Lewis, 47, who had been released from prison in the previous week.

The police did not disclose where Mr. Lewis was living after his release but said they had spoken to his family members, who live in other towns in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Earlier in the search, the authorities said they had found a comforter, an adult’s yellow shirt and a pair of children’s underwear.

The authorities said on Thursday that two DNA profiles had been recovered from the underwear: the girl’s and Mr. Lewis’s.

The case has gripped Australia since the girl went missing. More than 200 people worked around the clock hoping for a good outcome, the chief minister of the Northern Territory, Lia Finocchiaro, said.

“Every Territorian has had their heart in their throat, waiting for the moment that we got the announcement that she’d been found safe and well,” Ms. Finocchiaro told reporters on Thursday.

“That news did not come,” she added, “and it’s fair to say everyone is feeling this loss acutely.”

The assistant commissioner of the Northern Territory Police, Peter Malley, said the force’s sole focus was finding Mr. Lewis.

“I say to the family of Jefferson Lewis that we believe he’s murdered this child,” Commissioner Malley said on Thursday. “Do not assist him — get him to the police station and we’ll look after him.”

“And I say to Jefferson Lewis,” he added, “we’re coming for you.”

Mr. Lewis was sentenced to prison multiple times in the past decade for serious assaults, contravening domestic violence orders, breaching bail and resisting police, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported. He had been released from prison six days before the girl’s disappearance, the ABC said.

The authorities said in a news conference on Wednesday that they believed the girl was alive and that they had deployed numerous resources in the search for her, calling it one of the “biggest investigations” in the territory’s history.

The police said it had been a difficult investigation because they were unable to digitally track Mr. Lewis as he did not have a phone. They compared it to policing in the 1930s.

“This man doesn’t have a telephone, he doesn’t have a bank account, he doesn’t have a car,” Commissioner Malley said on Wednesday. “So some of the usual practices that we do in 2026 aren’t applicable.”