CELEBRITIES joined thousands of Twitter followers in a national campaign to find missing youngsters including a teenager who has been missing from Eastbourne for more than a year.

Celebrities including Stephen Fry and Simon Cowell joined a 24-hour charity Twitter campaign to help find missing children including Bekim Ferati who went missing from Eastbourne 15 months ago.

The Missing People's charity’s Big Tweet on International Missing Children's Day also sent out an appeal to millions of people worldwide about the whereabouts of Lancing teen Katie Sallis, who went missing earlier this month.

The charity tweeted a different appeal for a missing child every 30 minutes for 24 hours throughout yesterday and encouraged followers around the world to spread the message far and wide. [Monday] Young Bekim was 14 when he went missing from his foster home in Eastbourne in February 2014.

The Albanian asylum seeker had no family in the UK and was living in Sorrel Drive, Eastbourne, until he went missing on a Sunday night.

Sussex Police raised an appeal to find the teenager at the time warning that he spoke very little English and had very little money Also among the 48 missing children the charity highlighted during the day was 16-year-old Katie Sallis who went missing from Lancing eleven days ago.

The charity estimates that around 140,000 children go missing in the UK every year and their patron Stephen Fry urged users to help "reunite families going through the worst experience imaginable".

He said: "It is a very simple concept and there is simply no excuse not to get involved.

"By retweeting these appeals, we can all help extend the platform that might bring those children home. Circulating the details of these children through the social media site is such a simple, yet incredibly effective way to give the appeals as much coverage as possible.

"I was so impressed by how the world of Twitter responded last year - an incredible 58,000 retweets in one day. The result? Two missing children were found. Invaluable."

The campaign was also backed by Madeline McCann’s mother Kate, who, writing in the Sun, said the campaign "harnesses social media for good".

She said: "Every pair of eyes and ears makes a big difference to the search.

"You might be that someone who recognises one of the faces seen on Twitter as you pass them by in the street, or the supermarket, or the train station."

Factfile

Missing People is the only charity in the UK which specialises in bringing missing children and adults back together with their families.

The charity estimates that 140,000 young people under 18 years of age go missing each year.

This includes an estimated 100,000 children under 16 years of age who run away overnight from home or care each year in the UK, with more than two-thirds of these cases not reported to the police.

An estimated two-thirds of all missing persons’ reports concern children and young people aged under 18.