Disappearance of Georgina Gharsallah

Georgina Gharsallah was born in Brighton, Sussex, in 1987 to Andrea (English) and Gassem Gharsallah (Libyan). The family lived in Libya from shortly after her birth until 1998, when they returned to the UK and settled in Worthing, West Sussex. Gharsallah, the second of four daughters, had experienced mental health issues including bulimia and social anxiety. By 2018 she was unemployed, recently estranged from her partner, and had two children from a previous relationship. She had moved back in with her mother while still regularly meeting her former partner, and family members described her as prone to binge-drinking. A 2025 Channel 4 documentary examined her associations in Brighton, including a period working at a kebab shop reportedly used as a front by an Albanian crime family involved in Class A drug supply in the Brighton and Worthing area; the father of her two children had also worked there.

On the morning of Wednesday, 7 March 2018, Gharsallah left her mother's house around 09:30, saying she planned to visit a phone shop about a mobile phone problem, go to the Jobcentre Plus, and meet her father later that morning. CCTV recorded her entering the Clifton Food and Wine shop on Clifton Road, Worthing, around 09:50, where the manager recalled directing her to a specialist phone shop. This was the last confirmed sighting of her. She did not attend the Jobcentre or meet her father as planned. Her phone was last used at 03:00 that day and dropped off the network after 11:30 while connected to a local Worthing mast; it never reconnected. Her bank accounts and cards have not been used since.

Her mother, Andrea, was not initially alarmed, assuming Gharsallah had stayed with friends or returned to her ex-partner. Concern grew the following week when Gharsallah failed to arrange her usual weekend with her sons and her ex-partner reported not having heard from her. Andrea reported her missing to Sussex Police on 17 March 2018.

The police investigation was described as slow to start; after three weeks the case was upgraded to suspicious. Investigators considered scenarios including voluntary disappearance, suicide, and abduction/murder, regarding the last as most likely in the absence of contrary evidence. A possible CCTV sighting of two women in Worthing town centre at around 15:30 on 7 March, one resembling Gharsallah, was circulated by police in August 2019, but the women were never identified, and discrepancies in footwear raised doubts about whether it was her. The case featured on BBC Crimewatch in October 2018, with a Crimestoppers reward later raised to £10,000 when the case became a murder inquiry in August 2019.

Gharsallah's family, dissatisfied with the pace of the inquiry, ran a crowd-funded parallel investigation involving social media appeals, a filmed reconstruction, site searches, and retired detectives, and in July 2020 requested an independent review of alleged police failings from the newly appointed chief constable. Comparisons were drawn with the Claudia Lawrence and Madeleine McCann cases, with some observers questioning whether race was a factor in the resourcing of the inquiry; Sussex Police denied racial bias. Gharsallah's fate remains unknown.