Colleagues believe Mr Lees may have hurt himself and lost his way or become disorientated.He had driven out to the forest from his hotel in Fort Dauphin in a four-wheel vehicles with a driver and was due to fly back to London on Sunday. "The longer it goes on, the less likely it is that everything is going to turn out well," he said.The area of forest in which Mr Lees disappeared is remote, inaccessible and so thick that rescuers might not hear somone's cries for help even if they were only 30 or 40 yards away. Villagers in the area were considered peaceful and the forest had no wild animals large enough to attack him.Charles Secrett, director of Friends of the Earth, said he was growing increasingly worried. Staff from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, which has offices in the capital and Fort Dauphin, were also helping in the search.The embassy said it feared Mr Lees, campaigns director of Friends of the Earth, had had an accident. Accompanying them was a senior British official from the embassy in Antananarivo, thecapital, who was acting as liaison with local police and village headmen, who have been co-ordinating the search.

His girlfriend, Chris Orengo,a geneticist, and a Friends of the Earth researcher, Jonathan Kaplan, who knows the island well, yesterday arrived in Fort Dauphin to join in the search. A helicopter was also borrowed from a local hospital. Friends of the Earth, and Mr Lees' family, have offered a reward in Madagascar for information leading to his return. FoE yesterday declined to say how much this was but described it as a "substantial amount in local terms". Police co-ordinating the search were yesterday flying tracker dogs from the capital, Antananarivo, to Fort Dauphin. Mr Lees, 46, the campaigns director of Friends of the Earth, disappeared last Saturday after walking into the forest on a filming investigation 15km from Fort Dauphin on the south-eastern coast. Helicopters flew over the forests, and tracker dogs were flown in to the area.

Instead, he said, giving charitable status to state schools should be considered.He also opposed the introduction of VAT on school fees.David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers said: "Grant maintained school heads among our members need assurances that a Labour government would not abolish their schools.''. The hunt for Andrew Lees, the British environmentalist who has been missing in the dense tropical forests of Madagascar for six days, was stepped up yesterday. "The patronising benevolence of some towards under-achievement has only reinforced inequality.''Don Foster, the Liberal Democrats' education spokesman, told the conference that grant maintained schools and city technology colleges should be returned to local authorities.He opposed the removal of charitable status from independent schools, which Labour has said it is contemplating. "There has been much exaggeration about the extent of Town Hall bureaucracy in the past but there has also been truth in it.''Mr Blunkett supported a drive for higher educational standards as the key to fighting disadvantageand deprivation. "I have broad shoulders,'' he said.He spoke of the central role of local authorities as champions of their communities but accepted that they had been too bureaucratic in the past.He advocated a new partnership between schools and local authorities with councils using a lighter touch."The partnership must be flexible so the schools can choose those services which they can provide themselves and those which would be better offered by the local education authority.''He appealed to local authorities to be imaginative about the partnership. At the last election the party said it would return opted-out schools to local authority control.Mr Blunkett shrugged off recent troubles in which he appeared to be at odds with the party leadership over the issue of VAT on private school fees. And they demanded the party come clean on its policy on opting out.Labour's confusion over opting out was revealed last month when it was disclosed that Tony Blair's son was to attend an opted out school.

Labour's White Paper spoke about a local democratic framework. It is my task to build a consensus around this concept embracing all who wish to contribute to that debate about the way forward.''Headteachers said the speech appeared to signal Labour's acceptance of grant maintained schools. Mr Blunkett told the North of England education conference in York that now schools managed their own budgets there was no substantial difference between local authority and opted out schools. "It is not beyond the wit of man or woman to build on local management schools so that we can try to give all schools a comprehensive admissions policy.''He said in a statement: "Over the coming months I will be talking to teachers, governors, parents both from the local authority sector and grant maintained schools. He pretended to be Hector Moretta Portillo, working for the United Nations and related to the former Mexican president Portillo, and would speak in a Mexican accent. He used other false names to rent offices near his home and dealt on the telephone through an answering machine.The case continues today.. David Blunkett, Labour's education spokesman, yesterday tried to placate both the right and left of his party by emphasising the importance of local authorities while extending a friendly hand to opted out schools.

But there were no examples of cigarettes ever being delivered, the court was told. "There is clear evidence the cigarettes that were supposed to exist did not exist," said Mr Globe.Austin never used his true identity in the fraud and even his closest associates did not know who he was. He told them he had access to large amounts of Mexican-made Philip Morris cigarettes which were packaged as if they were the company's more expensive American-made brand and could be sold at huge profits.Buyers were found and false documents were used to get banks to pay out with letters of credit for the consignments. But, instead, he was shot twice behind the right ear.Mr Globe said: "They were professional assassins paid, and presumably highly paid, for their work.