The brother and future sister-in-law of missing Liam Colgan have insisted there will be no wedding until they can bring him home.
The 29-year-old vanished last weekend, while on his brother Eamonn’s stag in Hamburg. A huge search has been mounted, and police are following up at least three potential sightings.
But yesterday, there were fresh fears for his safety following reports a body had been pulled from the city’s River Elbe.
Eamonn however, quickly confirmed it was not his brother, and urged people to keep searching for him.
He said: “The police have contacted me and told me the body recovered from the river is not Liam.
“I can’t obviously say who they think it is and they have no reason to tell me but the description does not match Liam. We are putting a plan together about what areas we need to target next.
“Until we hear anything otherwise we can’t give up the search and we have to remain optimistic.”
Liam vanished in the early hours of February 10 during a pub crawl in the Reeperbahn red light district.
Since then officers have checked waterways, scoured CCTV and used sniffer dogs to help trace the Royal Mail worker’s scent, but are yet to find him.
Last week, Eamonn and his fiancee Susan Dolan flew back out to Hamburg to help in the search, while handing out hundreds of posters and flyers with Liam’s information.
Despite having a venue booked to tie the knot on March 2, he said the wedding was the last thing on his mind.
Eamonn added: “The wedding really isn’t something we are thinking about just now. It’s not a priority for us at all.
“There isn’t going to be a wedding until we can bring Liam home.”
In recent days, police have probed possible sightings in the town of Buxtehude, 20 miles south-west of Hamburg.
On Wednesday, a bakery worker told officers she was “certain” she had seen him.
Bettina Diwinski insisted one of her colleagues at Dietz bakers had recognised Liam from the missing posters.
She said: “We saw a photograph of the man in the newspapers and we realised he had been here.
“He looked lost and confused and then he left the shop. He looked lonely.”
On the same morning, a woman claimed she gave him a bottle of water, while another sighting beside a nearby Lidl supermarket was called in on Thursday.
Eamonn described the sightings as offering a “chink of light” in their desperate search, and said they would continue to explore every possibility to find his brother.
He added: “We don’t really know what we are doing, but we’re doing as much as we can when we get new information.
“With every person that goes past, I’m looking at them to see if it’s Liam.”