A Bradford woman who feared her friend had been murdered in war-torn Kosovo was overjoyed today after discovering he is alive and well.

The Telegraph & Argus broke the news to Joyce Wilkinson who had feared her close friend Fadil Himani, a Kosovar Albanian had been a victim of the Serbian ethnic cleansing squads.

But now he has been found, and the two of them put in touch thanks to a million-to-one chance meeting in a refugee camp with a Bradford aid worker in Albania.

Fadil managed to dodge Serb soldiers and cross the border to the safety of a refugee camp where he met Mandy Farrar from Bradford.

And he told her how he had spent three years in Bradford as an asylum seeker and struck up a lasting friendship with Mrs Wilkinson, 60, of Baildon, Shipley.

Mrs Farrar told the Telegraph & Argus of the meeting and our reporter tracked Mrs Wilkinson to the hat stall she runs in Bradford's Kirkgate Market.

Mrs Wilkinson said: "I'm absolutely thrilled that he's alive - I can't believe it - it's wonderful news. I've been watching the pictures on the TV hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

"Everybody knew him in the market and we were always talking about him wondering if he was all right. He's a gentle giant of a man but he always stands up for himself so we hoped he would survive."

Mrs Farrar - who spent ten days touring Albanian refugee camps on an aid trip from Bradford Aid for Kosovo - told how she met Fadil at an emergency camp in a sports centre 15km north of a town called Durress.

She said: "I was a bit overcome by emotion seeing these people queuing up in a sports centre so I had gone for a sit down when this man approached me.

"At first I thought he was an aid worker because he had really good English. He asked me where I was from and when I said England he said that he had been to Bradford and had good friends in Kirkgate market. It was unbelievable - it was out of this world.

"He didn't have a penny and was stuck in the camp. He said that he had been forced to leave his home in Pristina and didn't know where his family was. He was desperate to get a message to Bradford.

"He was quite lucky to be there because they shot a lot of the young men."

Fadil had become a familiar face in Bradford's Kirkgate market between 1994 and 1997 when he was a political asylum seeker in Bradford fleeing persecution from the Serbian military forces.

He fled to Britain in 1994 after falling foul of the Serb police as a Kosovo Liberation Army volunteer.

His family home was ransacked by police searching for rifles and he was dragged to the police station.

When he fought back the police broke all the bones his hands and arms leaving him in hospital for two months.

Mrs Wilkinson, who carries Fadil's picture in her wallet, had spoken to him twice a week after he left England in 1997 but had been unable to contact him since Christmas and feared the worst.

She said: "When he got out of hospital they came for him again but he managed to escape through a window and then fled to England in the back of a lorry.

"When the lorry stopped he jumped out and found he was in Bradford. He turned himself into the police and asked for asylum."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.