HUNDREDS of thousands of internet users have watched a new video targeting those who know what happened to Madeleine McCann.

Gerry McCann hailed the global online appeal as a “world first” and said he and his wife, Liverpool-born Kate, were “hopeful” it would lead to a breakthrough in the search for their missing daughter.

The 60-second film – titled A Minute For Madeleine – was posted on the website of the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre.

The “viral” internet appeal is aimed at persuading a friend or relative of the person responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance to “do the right thing”.

Mr McCann, 41, said: “We’re optimistic that this message will get to them, it will cause them to wrestle with their conscience.

“They may not give in to that conscience on the first viewing, it might be the second or third.

“I think that’s another important bit of the internet here. The power of the internet is the persistence.

“We are hopeful. You would have to be living in another world not to see this message – that’s what we’re relying on.”

The video includes two new digitally-aged pictures of how Madeleine might look now, aged six.

In one of them, she has dark brown hair and tanned skin, in case she has been living in north Africa or southern Europe.

Mrs McCann, 41, whose parents still live in Allerton, said it was “very strange” to see the images for the first time. She added: “It’s not particularly pleasant because it’s not the Madeleine we remember.”

The couple also revealed that their four-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie, have started saying they want to find and fight the person who took their missing sister.

Mr McCann said: “I said, ‘No, what we will do is we will give them to the police and then we’ll put them in jail’. They talk about her more than Kate and I talk about her, it’s incredible.”