Divers are searching 'five areas of interest' in a canal in a bid to discover the fate of schoolgirl Moira Anderson, who vanished 60 years ago.

Police Scotland identified the search areas in the Monkland Canal at Carnbroe, near Coatbridge in North Lanarkshire, using ground-penetrating radar, sonar and magnetometry.

Police hope their specialist divers can recover any unusual objects from a layer of silt on the canal bed.

Eleven-year-old Coatbridge girl Moira disappeared on February 23, 1957, after leaving her grandmother's house to buy margarine. She was later seen on a bus driven by convicted paedophile Alexander Gartshore.

In 2015, police said Gartshore would have been indicted for Ms Anderson's murder if he were still alive. He died in 2006.

Moira's sister, Janet Hart, has welcomed the fresh search saying it was the "most hopeful" she had been in 60 years that Moira's body would be recovered.

The canal search, which began on Monday, comes four years after an exhumation at Old Monkland Cemetery in 2013 failed to provide any clues about what happened to Moira.

A spokesman said: "Police Scotland and the former Strathclyde Police worked closely with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service over the years to investigate her disappearance and examine any new evidence.

"This led to the site at Monkland Canal being identified with the aim of finding any trace of Moira."