Search resumes for missing UK toddler Madeleine McCann
Police in Portugal are said to be preparing to search a reservoir some 50km (31 miles) from where the three-year-old went missing in 2007.
Portuguese police are resuming the search for Madeleine McCann, the toddler from the United Kingdom who disappeared in the country’s Algarve in 2007, at the request of German authorities.
Portugal’s judicial police released a statement on Monday confirming local media reports that they will conduct the search at the request of German authorities and in the presence of British officials.
Portuguese television showed an area cordoned off around the Arade reservoir, nearly 50km from where the then three-year-old went missing in the Algarve tourist resort of Praia da Luz.
Local media reported that police had already combed the site in 2008, but divers found only animal remains. The new search was to begin on Tuesday.
British, Portuguese and German police are still investigating what happened when the toddler disappeared from her bed at the southern Portuguese resort on May 3, 2007. She was in the same room as her two-year-old twin brother and sister while her parents had dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant.
In mid-2020, German police identified Christian Brueckner, a 45-year-old German who was in the Algarve in 2007, as a suspect in the case. Brueckner has denied any involvement.
The suspect is being investigated on suspicion of murder in the McCann case, but has not been charged. He spent many years in Portugal, including in Praia da Luz around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.
Prosecutors in the northern German city of Braunschweig indicted Brueckner in October on several separate cases involving sex crimes allegedly committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
Braunschweig prosecutor Christian Wolter said Monday his office would release a statement on the case Tuesday morning.
The Portuguese weekly Expresso reported that the suspect regularly spent time near the reservoir outside the small inland town of Silves.
Portuguese police ended 14 months of their investigation in 2008 after controversially saying the parents of the missing child were suspects before clearing them of any involvement. The case was reopened five years later citing “new elements”.
Madeleine’s disappearance sparked worldwide interest, with public claims of seeing her as far away as Australia, along with a slew of books and television documentaries on the case.
Rewards for finding Madeleine amounted to several million dollars.