Police are ‘closing in’ on British Madeleine suspect

Aug 21 2007 by Caroline Innes, Liverpool Daily Post

A SUSPECT in the abduction of Madeleine McCann has been under surveillance in Britain for weeks and could be arrested imminently, a Portuguese newspaper has reported.

Portuguese newspapers last night continued to speculate that police are closing in on a suspect, who lives in the UK, and who upon arrest could be extradited to Portugal for questioning.

The major daily Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manha (CM) claimed police are hoping the results of forensic tests being done on various samples will confirm existing suspicions.

The paper said: “Police authorities believe that if the results confirmed other evidence already gathered there could be developments in the next few days and the British police can advance to arrests in the United Kingdom, confirming or not the suspicions that fall on one man.

It is 110 days since the missing four-year-old was snatched from her bed in her family’s holiday apartment in the Algarve seaside village of Praia da Luz.

And while the police investigation has shifted direction in recent weeks, with British detectives and sniffer dogs being sent to Portugal to help with the inquiry, reports claim that it has finally entered a new “decisive phase.”

Preliminary DNA tests on blood specks found by the dogs in the McCanns’ apartment revealed they came from a man, newspapers reported last week.

The full forensic results will be returned “imminently”, according to reports but Portuguese Police say they have been kept in the dark as to when they will finally be in possession of the final results.

A spokeswoman for the Forensic Science Service (FSS) in Birmingham, which is carrying out the analysis of the samples, said only that the tests were still “ongoing”.

Last week in an exclusive interview with the Daily Post, Liverpool-born Kate McCann, Madeleine’s mother, said while they were frustrated by secrecy laws they had learnt to trust the authorities.

She said: “We now only trust what we are told by official sources and have stopped reading the Portuguese papers.”

Unconfirmed reports in Portuguese papers now suggest that police will step up the hunt for the young girl this week by launching a series of new searches.

Donations to the fund set up by former Notre Dame High School pupil Kate McCann and her husband, Gerry, to help find Madeleine have now topped £1m.

Meanwhile, it emerged last night that the McCanns had met the brother of murdered Liverpool hostage Ken Bigley, who was beheaded in Iraq in 2004. Footage of the murder was posted on the internet.

Phil Bigley visited the couple in Portugal on Saturday afternoon and discussed the trauma of having a relative kidnapped.

On his blog on the Find Madeleine website, Mr McCann wrote: “This afternoon we had a British visitor who came to offer us a different type of support. He has been through an ordeal similar to ours involving one of his family.

“It was good to talk about our emotions, the pressures and different coping strategies that we use in an ongoing trauma, with someone who has experienced a tragic event like ours.”

carolineinnes

Police in second interview of OAP who found intruder in flat opposite McCanns’ holiday apartment

PORTUGUESE police are to re-interview a pensioner who disturbed an intruder in her apartment directly above the McCanns’ holiday flat two weeks before Madeleine vanished, it has been reported.

This is not the first report of a break-in at the Ocean Club complex in Praia da Luz in recent months.

One Briton who owns a flat just 100m from the McCanns’ apartment said yesterday he suspected there were “a lot” of opportunistic burglaries in the resort. Ian Robertson experienced a break-in at his Ocean Club apartment, which is identical in layout to the McCanns’, in February.

The burglars stole two mobile phones, a camera and some money. Police discovered no signs of forced entry, although the thieves left the patio doors and a lounge window open.

When Mr Robertson reported the burglary to police, he met a woman from the Ocean Club who was there to complain about a second break-in.

He later discovered two of his neighbours with ground-floor flats – like the McCanns’ apartment – had also been burgled.