A teenage girl who last saw her father three years ago has made a desperate plea for him to make contact.

Toni Jefferson, 16, last met her father, Paul, just two days before her thirteenth birthday on February 22, 2001.

He turned up at her home in Wyke, where she was living with Mr Jefferson's ex-wife, with a cash birthday present.

The next she heard he was the subject of a police search high on the fells above Keighley, where officers believed he had been living for several weeks in a tent near Ponden reservoir.

Mr Jefferson, a 36 year-old jobless window fitter at the time, left behind a blue hire car, car keys and personal documents.

Woodland was combed and divers searched the reservoir as part of a wide search of the locality.

One of the last contacts he made was a letter written to Toni and her brother Michael, who was 15.

Toni, of St Mary's Square, Wyke, said she expected to see her father on her thirteenth birthday in February 2001, or at least to get a telephone call.

"I'd had my belly-button pierced and I was plucking up courage to tell him, but he never came," she said.

"I've wanted to find him for ages but didn't know how to go about it. I'm hoping he will want to see how I've grown up in the last few years.

"I worry about him all the time. I want to know he is safe. If he doesn't want to come back that's fair enough. All I want is to hear from him, although I would rather see him personally.

"He could write to me or call and let me know he is OK."

She recalled seeing the hire car when he visited her home before he went missing, and occasionally he arrived on foot.

In his last letter, written to her in April 2001, he said he was no longer living in his house in Foston Lane, Wyke, that he was somewhere else and was safe, she said.

Detectives believed that Mr Jefferson had been living in the tent in woodland beside the reservoir through several months of the winter between 2000 and 2001.