While the search continues in Ontario for missing for eight-year-old Victoria Stafford, the family of another girl who disappeared nearly two years ago in Quebec has issued an emotional plea for information to help find her.


Cédrika Provencher was nine-years-old when she went missing in July 2007 in Trois-Rivieres, a town halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.


Police launched a massive search for the little girl in the months following her disappearance, but there have been no leads on her whereabouts. Nor has there been any arrests in the case.


The family has been relentlessly looking for Cedrika with the help of hundreds of volunteers across the province. But the little girl's father said Tuesday the family can't cope anymore with the stress and pain of not knowing where she is.


"We want to find Cedrika and put this behind us. Alive or dead we want to find her. The pain that our family has been going through has to stop," Martin Provencher told reporters in Trois-Rivieres.


The family has asked prominent Quebec lawyer Guy Bertrand to help them crack the case. The family has offered $170,000 out of money it has raised, to anyone who would come forward with information to help locate Cedrika.


People who confide in Bertrand will not be handed over to authorities, the lawyer said, citing client-lawyer confidentiality.


Bertrand said he hopes to speak with witnesses, people who know the presumed kidnappers and even the kidnappers themselves.


"I am convinced that someone somewhere knows something about Cedrika's disappearance," Bertrand told a news conference. "Maybe they have remorse and they need to clear their conscience," he added.


Cedrika's parents are desperate to find out what happened to her and are willing to accept that they might never know who took their daughter or that the perpetrators could get away with it and with a large sum of money.


"Who wouldn't want to find their child? That's all we want," the girl's father said, adding he still thinks there is a chance his daughter will be found alive.


The girl's grandfather urged the abductors to seize this opportunity.


"We are offering them an extraordinary chance to provide information behind closed doors. No one will ever know what they said," Henri Provencher said Tuesday.


The lawyer stressed he is acting independently of the police and doesn't want to interfere with their work. Bertrand will work on the case until Sept. 30.


An earlier $100,000 reward from police for information about the girl did not yield any information.


The Provencher family offered words of hope as the search for Victoria Stafford got underway in Ontario in mid-April. The case also renewed interest and boosted calls with tips in the ongoing search for Cedrika.


The search for Stafford continued Tuesday in the county of Wellington, Ont. Oxford community police Const. Laurie-Anne Maitland acknowledged searches like this one or that for Cedrika take time and that can sometimes yield frustrations.


"I can't even imagine being in (Cedrika) parents' shoes and I think whatever hope they thought they could get from whatever effort it would take, a parent might do that," she said about their initiative to enlist a prominent lawyer.


On May 20, two arrests were made in the Stafford case. Terri-Lynne McClintic, 19, and Michael Rafferty, 28, each has been charged with first-degree murder.

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