Photo is of Jungle Barry, not Lord Lucan: Friends

The mystery behind the disappearance of Lord Lucan, a prominent British society figure, nearly three decades ago deepened on Tuesday with friends of a hippy from Goa, whom a new book claimed was the aristocrat, saying he was actually the son of a van driver.

Friends of 'Jungle Barry' Halpin, who took the hippy trail to India and died there seven years ago, have dismissed claims in the book that he was the fugitive aristocrat Richard John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, who vanished in 1974.

The wife of Lord Lucan also scorned the suggestion that her husband was the figure depicted, with wild white heard and straggly hair, in the book Dead Lucky by former Scotland Yard detective Duncan MacLaughlin.

Lord Lucan was officially declared dead in 1999, twenty-five years after the huge police manhunt undertaken when his children's nanny was beaten to death. The book claimed that Lucan, who disappeared after abandoning his bloodstained car in Newhaven, fled to Goa, where he lived under the name of Barry Halpin until his death in 1996.

MacLaughlin was told by a former drug-dealer, who befriended Halpin in Goa, that Halpin was a well-spoken gambler who loved to play backgammon, which Lucan, nicknamed 'Lucky', was also fond of.

Former friends of Halpin, however, said the hard-drinking folk singer, born in 1938 in St Helens and the son of a van driver, was definitely not Lucan.

BBC radio presenter Mike Harding said he had met Halpin years before Lucan's disappearance and believed the man in the pictures was his friend.

"I laughed, I cried, I fell about the road chuckling: to think that anybody could mistake my old pal Barry Halpin for Lord Lucan," Harding wrote in a letter to The Guardian newspaper published on Tuesday.

"He was a musician, storyteller and good-time Charlie of the 1960s folk revival in Liverpool, Manchester and beyond, who went to live in India because it was cheap, sunny and more spiritual than St Helens which is where he was living when I first knew him," he wrote.

Harding said he and Halpin had discussed the Lucan affair after the aristocrat vanished.  

"Barry was a socialist and republican to the bone, and delighted in the fact that when Lucan went missing, the people of Castlebar in County Mayo (in Ireland) -- which the Lucan estate still owns -- refused to pay rent until the great man came to collect it himself."

Stephen Nixon, 55, a surgeon based in Edinburgh, told The Sun newspaper that he grew up with Halpin in St Helens. The paper printed a 1971 photograph of Halpin that bears a strong resemblance to Lucan.

The Mirror newspaper quoted Beryl Anders, 62, a childhood friend of Halpin, as saying she recognised his picture when it appeared in media reports about 'Dead Lucky'.

"As soon as it came on the news I said 'It's our Barry.' I called a friend who knew him and we are both sure it was him," Anders was quoted as saying.  

Lady Lucan said on Monday that it was 'utterly absurd' to suggest that Halpin, who was three years younger than Lord Lucan, was her husband.