The head of a specialist underwater rescue team brought in to help look for missing mum Nicola Bulley has described her disappearance as "baffling". Forensic expert Peter Faulding said it was the most "unusual" case he has seen in two decades of working.
And he questioned whether the phone left on the bench near the river had been placed as a "decoy". Friends and family have arranged for Mr Faulding's private diving team Specialist Group International to aid the police search.
No clues were uncovered during a search of the river on Monday, and more investigations near the scene of the bench where Nicola's phone was found are being carried out on Tuesday. Mum-of-two Nicola, who had been walking her dog Willow by the River Wyre in Lancashire, has now been missing for 11 days
Speaking to BBC Breakfast from the scene on Tuesday (February 7), he said: "The initial searches we did on Monday were downstream in the tidal section of the river, not the key area where Nicola originally went missing. Today, we are focusing on the area upstream from the Wyre which is non-tidal and going about a mile upstream. This includes the area where the phone was found on the bench. I must state this area was searched on the day by police divers.
"These are very professional divers, and they didn't find anything and that is the odd thing about this. That is what I can't get my head around. It is very strange."
Police officers said they are working on the theory that the 45-year-old , who has been described by friends as a strong swimmer, fell into the river, but that line of investigation has been questioned by friends and family. Lancashire Police has consistently said that there are no signs of any third-party involvement in her disappearance.
The mortgage adviser was last seen while walking her dog Willow on Friday (January 27) in the Lancashire village of St Michaels on Wyre. Nicola - known as Nikki - left her daughters aged six and nine at school, before heading to the towpath overlooking the River Wyre.
She had been on a work conference call and her phone was still logged in when it was discovered on a bench along the towpath. Her microphone and camera had been turned off for the call. Several underwater searches have been carried out in the river next to the bench where her phone was found, but no traces of Nicola have been found. Willow was also found near the bench, but was dry so investigators don't think she had been in the water.
Mr Faulding said on Tuesday: "We are going to go back over the area (close to the bench) just in case. We don't know for certain that Nicola is in the river but if she went in further up, she could drift down so we are going to go back over the original area that was searched twice by the police.
"Sonar will image the riverbed and see everything that is lying down there. If Nicola is there, we will find her."
He added: "The key focus has been around the bench area. We have to rule out everywhere. We have to cover the whole stretch of the river. It is about 200 metres from the bench to the weir.
"We have got a dive team with us so if we find anything significant we will put our divers in straightaway. If Nicola is not in that stretch of the river today my view is that this was a decoy placed by the river.
"There is not enough CCTV to cover the area. It is so unusual. We have no clear information to go on at the moment. Normally a drowning victim is where they go down. Bodies don't float. Once they go to the bottom they stay at the bottom.
"This is so strange and in my 20 years of working these cases I have never seen anything so unusual."
Over the weekend friends released images from Ms Bulley’s own Ring Doorbell showing her dressed in heavy outdoor clothing loading her car before driving her daughters to school. The pictures were released by a friend in a bid to find her.
She was wearing a long black coat and her blonde hair was in a ponytail. Nicola left the car at the school and walked over to the river.
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