SPECULATION that missing chef Claudia Lawrence could have disappeared after going to meet a new boyfriend has been dismissed by her father.

Solicitor Peter Lawrence said Claudia, 35, told her friends about everything she did and he did not believe she would have met somebody and not let them know.

“It is just so unlikely. I think one of her friends would have known,” said 62-year-old Mr Lawrence, who travelled to London to appear on BBC1’s Missing Live programme.

“She’s the sort of person who is bubbly, who’s sociable, who chats to her friends, and so if I didn’t know, her friends would have known and also she didn’t have much time to do it, did she?,” he said.

Mr Lawrence said Claudia had been talking to her mother, Joan, on the phone at 8.10pm on the Wednesday she disappeared, and would have been in bed by 9pm because she was due to start work at 6am the following morning. He said she would have got up at 4am if she set off for work on the Thursday, as she always took a lot of care over her appearance.

Mr Lawrence, who lives at Slingsby, near Malton, said his daughter never used the internet and she did not even know how to use a computer.

“She’s a chef. She’s always worked with her hands. She’s never been interested in computers,” he said.

He appealed to anyone with information about his daughter’s disappearance, no matter how trivial, to come forward.

He said: “That means absolutely anything that anybody sees that they think is unusual, even if they don’t think it’s important.

“Somebody doing something strange, if somebody is getting extra food in, curtains are drawn, a car in an unusual place absolutely anywhere in the country – because it could be – just report it to North Yorkshire Police.

“There must be somebody out there that knows where Claudia is and hopefully wherever she is, she is safe. We just need her back.”

He spoke of the anguish the family was going through and the desperation of not knowing what had happened to his daughter.

“The investigation is inevitably slow and painstaking, and we are grateful to the police for their thoroughness.”

Earlier this week, detectives leading the investigation said they believed Claudia might have come to harm after meeting someone she knew. They initially suspected she had gone missing on Thursday morning during the two-mile walk from her home in Heworth Road to the University of York, where she worked.

But she does not appear on any CCTV footage from that morning along her normal route to work and police said it was possible she had met up with someone the night before she disappeared.

Claudia had no money, bank cards, passport of spare clothes with her when she went missing – only the small blue or green Karimor rucksack she used to carry her chef’s whites to work.

If you have any information to help the inquiry, phone North Yorkshire Police on 0845 60 60 247.

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