Missing child featured in AS Roma soccer campaign found

Italian football team AS Roma has helped reunite a missing boy with his family after launching a new campaign to help find missing children around the world.

A Kenyan teenager who had been missing for weeks was reunited with his family, according to the Italian club on Monday, following a social media campaign by the football team that featured the faces of missing children around the world.

The boy, 13, was featured on Twitter alongside an announcement that the club was signing Armenian midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan. The club tweeted that the child was found on the same day that the loaned Arsenal player scored his first goal for AS Roma. 

The football club began the campaign in June to raise awareness of missing children around the world in social media posts, partnering with the US charity National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Italian-based Telefono Azzurro.

'A big candle of hope'

"Through @missingchild_ke partnership with @ASRomaEN we lit a big candle of hope to guide these children back home to their families," tweeted Maryana Munyendo, executive director of Missing Child Kenya, one of the international charities that has worked together with AS Roma. 

This is not the club's first successful campaign to find missing children. In August a 15-year-old girl in London was found safe after being featured in a social media post announcing the signing of Turkish newcomer Mert Cetin.

"We have a massive social media following and our announcements generate incredible reach and awareness, all over the world," Paul Rogers, head of strategy at AS Roma, said in June when the campaign was launched.

"We thought that at the exact moment when the world's attention is on the club's announcement, we could use our social media channels not for self-promotion but rather to help both the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Telefono Azzurro find missing children."

The campaign will continue on the team's social media.