The sister of April Jones who went missing while playing on her bike just yards from her home says she is "terrified" to let her own children grow up, writes Emily Smith.

Five-year-old April Jones was abducted and murdered from her home in Machynlleth and her body has never been found.

13 years on, her older half sister Hazel Jones, now 31, is breaking her silence for the first time on the tragedy that tore her family apart.

Hazel, who was 18 and heavily pregnant at the time, says the trauma has shaped her life - and cast a long shadow over her own children’s future.

She said: “My daughter has just turned 13, she’ll be going into year eight this year and she wants to go and do stuff with her friends.

"I don’t know how I’m meant to let her grow up. Because I am quite scared of who is even around, who can you actually trust?

“Is there anyone watching you? Is there anyone following you? And it’s scary. The world we live in is literally so scary.

“After April I’m petrified to let my kids go out and grow up and start having their own lives.

“When my daughter was younger, when she was at the age of five, I was like oh my god this is the age April was when she went."

April was taken on the evening of 1 October, 2012.

She had been playing on her pink bicycle with her friends at the Bryn-y-Gog housing estate near her home when she got into a Land Rover owned by local man Mark Bridger.

He was later convicted of her abduction and murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

Despite an enormous search effort, April’s body was never found. Only fragments of her remains were found in Bridger’s cottage.

Hazel, who shares a father with April, remembers the exact moment she was told her half-sister was missing.

“I was at my own home in Aberaeron with my mother and my mum came up to me and says April’s missing. And I was just like what?

“And she says it again, ‘Hazel, April’s missing’. And it just took a couple of seconds that felt like bloody minutes to actually process what the hell she was saying.

"I was just in shock.”

Hazel raced to be with her dad, Paul, and the rest of the family but the reality sunk in the next day.

She said: “The next day came and then I think it fully sunk in that oh my god she’s actually really missing isn’t she?

“She’s not just gone for a little wander, she’s actually really missing.

“It was so overwhelming the actual thought of it.

“Because at the time it was a young girl that got into a van and it’s like surely not. This doesn’t happen does it?

“I just thought this doesn’t happen around here and it wouldn't happen to us of all people.

"And it did, and it was us, and it did happen.

"I never spoke out because at the end of the day that was our sister who had not only passed away but had been brutally murdered and kidnapped so what a process to have to go through."

When Hazel found out the news of what truly happened to April, she was “petrified”.

“I was so scared because I was carrying my daughter at the time and I was so scared to bring her into this world knowing that there was people like that on our doorstep.

“It really puts it into perspective that you can’t trust anyone. I just couldn’t get over how this could have happened."

Only a few weeks later, Hazel gave birth to her daughter Amelia - a moment that should have been filled with joy, but was instead tangled in grief and disbelief.

“It was surreal because when dad and Coral came to see her in the hospital when she was first born, they were just shocked because she looked like April.”

"It was so difficult because I had just lost my sister and just given birth. I was trying to mourn my sister but also love my new daughter."

Now a mother of three - with Amelia 13, Ethan, 10, and Hefin, six, Hazel says the anxiety has never fully gone away.

Hazel added that April had a striking resemblance to her daughter at that age - something that made the grief even harder to bear.

“She had only been on this earth for five years and I remember looking at her thinking you have not even experienced life yet, and that was taken away from April.

“I do want my daughter to see the world and have everything that April couldn’t."

But she's honest with her children about April - and has a box of memories and newspaper clippings they can look at when they’re ready.

She said: “I have never hid it away from my kids and I won't hide it away.

“At the end of the day it’s real life, it has happened and I want them to be wary of their own selves.”

Earlier this year, the family suffered another loss. Hazel’s father, Paul died on May 14, after being diagnosed with a brain disease in 2018, six years after the death of his little girl.

“My dad was never right after April,” Hazel said.

“Once April went, a part of him went completely and he never came back from that.

“All I think is that he is now back with April and back to a peaceful life. Him passing was just like a part of me went too. I fought for him for so long”

Summer last year, April’s killer was attacked in prison, for a second time. Hazel said: “He deserves everything he’s getting. He literally deserves it all.”

The mother-of-three believes more should be done to protect children from child predators - and says she fully supports proposals to chemically castrate sex offenders.

“Chemically castrating paedophiles is 100 per cent right. I’m so backing that.

“I read a lot of the comments on news articles about sex offenders and people are saying it should be the death penalty. But I don’t think so.

“They should be made to suffer. The death penalty is an easy way out. He didn’t give April an easy way out did he?

“Make him suffer, make him live every day because he’s not coming out. Make him live in fear.”

Even now, more than a decade later, she says what happened to her sister still doesn’t feel real.

“It’s been 13 years now and it’s still not actually sunk in.

“I still don’t believe it. I don’t know whether I don’t want to believe it but I just don’t believe it happened to us.

“I’m still waiting to wake up from this nightmare.”

Last month, April’s mother, Coral, backed a campaign calling for a new criminal offence on body desecration as Senedd members were told she longs to lay her daughter to rest in a grave.

MS Cefin Campbell told Senedd members Coral said: “My little girl is still missing in the eyes of the law'. The funeral took place, but the coffin was almost empty. Inside were only a few small pieces of bone and some personal items that Coral placed there herself. There was no body to lay to rest, no real goodbye.”