Police are examining evidence removed from the site of a former New York grocery store where a man says he killed a six-year-old boy more than 30 years ago.
Officers from the New York police department searched the space, which is now an eyeglass store, but in 1979 was a bodega where the alleged abductor of Etan Patz once worked.
Paul Browne, a spokesman for the NYPD, said police returned to examine an area on Wednesday that was not searched on earlier visits. He said the visit was not based on any new information.
Browne declined to discuss what, if anything, was found, but officers were seen removing a number of bags from the scene.
Pedro Hernandez has been charged in the killing of Patz, one of the first missing children whose picture ever appeared on a milk carton. He remains held without bail.
Hernandez was a teenage stock clerk at the convenience store when Etan disappeared on his way to school on 25 May, 1979, a date that would later be commemorated as National Missing Children's Day. A judge in 2001 declared the boy dead, but his body has never been found.
The suspect's sister has said she heard secondhand that he told a church prayer group in the 1980s that he killed a child in New York City. But Hernandez, now 51, was not regarded as a suspect in Etan's disappearance until last month, when police were alerted by a tip-off.
Police say Hernandez, of Maple Shade, New Jersey, told investigators he lured the boy into the shop with the promise of a soda. He allegedly said he led the child to the basement, choked him and left his body in a bag of trash about a block away.
Court dates in the case have been put on hold as doctors evaluate Hernandez's mental fitness for trial and investigators seek more evidence beyond his alleged confession.
"There remains an enormous amount of energy and investigative efforts devoted to the case," Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance said, when asked about it at an unrelated news conference last week.
Defense attorney Harvey Fishbein has described Hernandez as bipolar and schizophrenic, with a history of hallucinations. The lawyer declined to comment Wednesday.
