DETECTIVES trying to find the body of a murdered mother-of-three brought her killer to a North Yorkshire roadside in a bid to find her.

The painstaking search for Rania Alayed was portrayed on BBC 2’s hard-hitting documentary The Detectives on Wednesday, which showed Greater Manchester Police’s continued hunt for her remains.

Her husband, Ahmed Khatib, 33, from Gorton, Manchester was found guilty of her murder in 2014 and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years.

Rania Alayed had moved from Teesside to Manchester in January after previously living in Middlesbrough then Norton, Stockton.

She had met her husband aged 15 in Syria, but she left him after years of violence and control.

Upon leaving him she feared for her life and sought help but he eventually murdered her while her children were in the next room. With the help of his brother, Muhaned al-Khatib, 38, they placed her body in a suitcase and drove her body to North Yorkshire.

Both he and Ahmed Al-Khatib, of Gorton, had pleaded guilty to intending to pervert the course of justice by transporting and concealing the body of Alayed.

The detectives followed DS Ian Shaw’s continued efforts to find the mother’s body. They drove her convicted killer in handcuffs to a layby on the A19 near Thirsk to see if he could show them where he had buried Rania.

He gave a grim description at the roadside of how he had buried her, but was only able to remember digging a hole beneath some trees at the side of the road.

Television viewers were shown how they deployed a drone fitted with Lidar technology, which uses lasers to detect disturbances just below the ground. It identified 82 possible burial sites across an area equivalent to two football pitches set back from the A19 but investigations of the sites revealed nothing.

DS Shaw said: “Imagine if you build a 5,000 piece jigsaw and there was one piece missing at the end. It’s taken you ages to get there, it’s very intricate but you can’t complete it because you were missing one piece. That’s how a detective feels when you don’t get that last piece of the jigsaw. There are no words to describe how you feel.

“It’s people’s lives we’re talking about.”

He said they would not give up on the search.

“If you were a victim’s family you certainly wouldn’t want the police to say, “we can’t solve this; we can’t do anything with it but we can’t give up,” he said.

“When you put your life and soul into the case it is very hard to move on.”

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said the case will never be closed as they still haven’t found her body.

“If we get critical information that comes to light that could lead to us finding her body we will carry on searching. It’s not an active search where we have people at the scene searching on a daily basis. It will never be closed until we find her.”

He added: “If it will jog people’s memory or more information comes to light, if anyone has any information we would always encourage them to come forward. Any credible information we will be ready to act on.”