ACROSS THE POND: Manchester's Serial 'Pusher' Drowns 29th Victim

Fears across the pond about a serial killer dubbed 'The Pusher' have heightened again, now that another drowned man has surfaced in a Manchester UK canal.

The body of "a white middle-aged male" was found floating in a Greater Manchester spillway over the weekend, making his "unexplained" drowning one of dozens that have occurred in the past several years.

Manchester cops and coroners have ruled the cold-weather drowning deaths of at least 29 of these "mostly young male victims" as due to "undetermined" causes, in many cases also labeling their missing persons cases "suspicious."

In fact, in 2015 local officials acknowledged in a YouTube public-service presentation intended to allay serial murder fears that "some" of their drowned men had indeed been "deliberately pushed" by an unknown assailant.

Manchester UK's elusive serial Pusher allegedly has been active since 2008, but a couple of high profile disappearances and drownings of male college students in 2011 and 2012 brought national attention to the case:

On New Year's day 2012, young design student Souvik Pal vanished without a trace, after bar bouncers physically removed him from the Warehouse Project Club in Trafford Park.

Minutes after, surveillance cameras captured images of the teen being escorted on foot by an *unidentified* man, after which Pal was never seen alive again. 

The body of the 18-year-old "excellent swimmer" was pulled from the Bridgewater Canal system almost a month later; and a medical examiner then left his case open and unsolved when she couldn't determine how he'd entered the water.

Pal joins the ranks of numerous other young men who also "got separated" from their friends and subsequently met a chilly end in Manchester waterways.

For instance, 21-year-old athlete and sports trainer Nathan Tomlinson likewise vanished while visiting a city pub after dark during the winter holidays.

His  body was fished out of the River Irwell in February 2011, two months after he went missing.

In all, some seven-dozen victims like Tomlinson and Pal have been pulled from the area's icy canals and rivers in as many years.

Although the majority of these were ruled "accidental," far too many others disappeared and drowned under circumstances which were clearly so questionable that even crime experts are now subscribing to the serial Pusher theory.

Birmingham City University professor and criminologist Craig Jackson is just one of many who have been expressing similar beliefs that "it's unlikely" all of Manchester's water fatalities could be "accidents or suicides."

And in a recent United Kingdom news documentary titled Manchester's Serial Killer? a senior police detective also outlined the body of evidence which supports a contention that the multiple drownings are intentional homicides.

The Case of The Drowning Men first came to light in the United States during the late 1990s.

Since then, hundreds of young males of every race, creed and nationality have suddenly gone missing, only to be found drowned days, weeks or months later in rivers, lakes, ponds, streams ... and canals.

America calls its pushers 'The Smiley Face Killers' but, by whatever moniker they're called, the standard operating procedure appears to be the same.

EPONYMOUS ROX