Georgina Gharsallah

Status:

Open

Jurisdiction:

sussex-police

Missing From:

Worthing, West Sussex

Summary:

Georgina Gharsallah, born 29 October 1987, is an English woman who went missing after leaving her mother's house in Worthing, West Sussex, on 7 March 2018. The 30-year-old mother of two disappeared while running errands. In August 2019, Sussex Police reclassified the disappearance as a homicide investigation, marking a shift from a standard missing persons case to a murder inquiry without a body. She remains missing.

Vital Statistics

Circumstances of Disappearance:

Georgina left her mother's house on Wednesday, 7 March 2018 at around 09:30. She told her mother that she was having problems with her mobile phone and that she would visit a phone shop to seek advice. She also said that she would visit the Jobcentre Plus in Worthing town centre and would meet her father later in the morning. She was recorded on CCTV at around 09:50 entering the nearby Clifton Food and Wine shop in Clifton Road, Worthing. The shop manager would later recall that Gharsallah had asked him for help with her phone and that he had directed her to a specialist phone shop. This would be the last confirmed sighting of Gharsallah. Subsequent tracking of her mobile phone indicated its last use at 03:00 on the day and that it had left the network shortly after 11:30 while still connected to a local mast in Worthing. It never reconnected to the network. Gharsallah's bank accounts and bank cards have not been used since. At around 15:30 on 7 March 2018, two women were recorded together in Worthing town centre and one of them resembled Gharsallah. The video footage was circulated by the police in August 2019 with a request for information, but the two women were never identified. One obvious discrepancy is that Gharsallah was wearing black high-heeled boots in the morning video at Clifton Road but the woman in the town centre that afternoon was wearing tan coloured flat-heeled boots. For the two sightings to be the same person, it would require that Gharsallah had changed her footwear during the day.

Additional Details:

Andrea was not initially disturbed when Gharsallah did not return to her house later that day since she was familiar with her daughter's lifestyle. She assumed that Gharsallah had either gone to stay with friends or had returned to her ex-partner. It was only the following week that Andrea became alarmed. Gharsallah failed to make arrangements to host her two sons for the weekend as was normal. Her ex-partner telephoned to say that he had not heard from Gharsallah for several days and was concerned about her. She contacted Sussex Police on Saturday, 17 March 2018 to report Gharsallah as a missing person. The Sussex Police investigation of Gharsallah's disappearance was significantly slow to get started. After three weeks, the disappearance was considered suspicious and the investigation was upgraded. After 17 days of investigation, police escalated her case from a missing person to a possible major crime and Operation Pavo was formed. Twenty-seven areas were searched, 60 sightings of Georgina were followed up, 427 officer's reports were written, and 484 police actions were raised. The case was featured on the BBC Crimewatch TV programme in October 2018. The Crimestoppers charity offered a £5,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Gharsallah's abductor. In August 2019, the police finally upgraded the investigation to that of a murder enquiry at which point the Crimestoppers reward was raised to £10,000. Key CCTV footage went unreviewed for more than a year, nine 'potentially' significant sections of footage were lost, and a failure to place Georgina on an Interpol watchlist occurred for more than 18 months. Two men were briefly arrested as a result of such a report, but were quickly released without charge. In a press conference on the 16th of September 2020, Georgina's mother Andrea and journalist Donal MacIntyre said that a bank account linked to a Playstation device Georgina owned was triggered in the last three weeks with a debit card payment of £7.99 made in July. In 2025 the case was the subject of Series 3 episode 2 of In the Footsteps of Killers on Channel 4. In the June 2025 Channel 4 documentary In the Footsteps of Killers, investigators Emilia Fox and criminologist Professor David Wilson explored her employment at the Albion Kebab Shop in Brighton during 2017. She had worked for a time in a kebab shop, then-owned and used as a front by an Albanian crime family. This family reportedly supplied Class A drugs in the Brighton and Worthing area. A £20,000 reward via the charity Crimestoppers is being offered for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for Ms Gharsallah's disappearance.

Case Last Updated:

May 11, 2026