Searchers urging people around the nation to look for missing Utah girl

SALT LAKE CITY -- Searchers on Sunday urged people nationwide to check ponds, ditches and woods for any trace of a 14-year-old girl apparently kidnapped at gunpoint from her bedroom.<br> <br> The number of volunteers searching on foot for Elizabeth Smart had dwindled to several hundred, down from more than 1,000 on Thursday, the day after Elizabeth disappeared.<br> <br> Some aircraft assisting in the search were diverted to Colorado wildfires.<br> <br> Bob Walcutt of the Texas-based Laura Recovery Center Foundation, which is coordinating volunteer search efforts, appealed Sunday for the help of property owners around the country.<br> <br> &#34;Check your land, your ditches, your culverts,&#34; he said. &#34;Look around your property and check any hiding places, your ponds, your barns.&#34;<br> <br> Police said they have had no solid leads since Elizabeth was apparently kidnapped at gunpoint from the bedroom of her affluent Salt Lake City home early Wednesday.<br> <br> Cynthia Smart-Owens, Elizabeth&#39;s aunt, said relatives think she&#39;s alive and issued another appeal for her release.<br> <br> &#34;The solution is to hold your feelings aside and send Elizabeth back to where she feels most at home,&#34; Smart-Owens said at a morning news conference. &#34;Let her walk alone where someone can recognize her. ... Please let her go.&#34;<br> <br> Eleven volunteer pilots took their planes up Sunday, down from 25 the day before; the number of weekend campers in nearby mountains made it difficult to locate anything considered suspicious.<br> <br> Elizabeth, described by friends and family as quiet, was taken from her home between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Wednesday. She was wearing red pajamas; police said the kidnapper allowed her to put on white tennis shoes before she was taken.<br> <br> Police said an intruder forced open a window at the Smart&#39;s home and woke the teen-ager and her 9-year-old sister. The frightened younger girl waited two hours before alerting her parents, complying with the gunman&#39;s threat to keep quiet or he would harm her sister, police said.<br> <br> <br>

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