Girl, 6, found dead after going missing on Bute

A six-year-old schoolgirl was found dead yesterday less than three hours after going missing from her home on a Scottish island.

Alesha Macphail, from Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, was reported missing at 6.25am, prompting desperate appeals on social media for people to search gardens and outbuildings in the

Ardbeg area of the seaside town.

Her body was found by a member of the public in woodland on the site of a former hotel demolished in the Seventies, sparking a major police inquiry on the holiday island in the Firth of Clyde.

Police said last night they were treating her death as “unexplained”.