- Police in Portugal are reopening the case of
Madeleine McCann, a British girl who was 3 years old
when she disappeared while on vacation there with her
family in 2007, prosecutors in Portugal said Thursday.
This follows the discovery of new lines of inquiry after
an internal review of the original Portuguese
investigation, London's Metropolitan Police said.
Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, have
been briefed on the decision, the UK police statement
said.
For parents of the missing, does hope spring eternal?
Mystery has surrounded Madeleine's disappearance
from her family's holiday villa in the Portuguese resort
town of Praia da Luz for the past six years.
A unit from the Metropolitan Police has also been
working on a new investigation. It issued fresh suspect
drawings in the case last week, along with a televised
appeal for information, which prompted a flood of calls
and e-mails from the public.
Neither her parents nor the detectives
investigating her case have given up on
one day finding the little girl from
Leicestershire, England.
The two police forces' investigations will
run in parallel and at the moment are
following separate new leads, the
Metropolitan Police said Thursday.
The Portuguese and UK police "have a shared
determination to do everything possible to discover
what happened to Madeleine," said Assistant
Commissioner Mark Rowley of the Metropolitan Police.
1,000 responses to new police appeal
But, he cautioned, while the latest developments are
welcome, the dual investigations are at relatively early
stages and much work remains to be done.
"This new momentum is encouraging, but we still have
a way to go, and as with all major investigations, not all
lines of inquiry that look promising will yield results,"
Rowley said.
UK detectives have been trying to reconstruct exactly
what happened on the night of May 3, 2007, when
Madeleine disappeared from the villa while her parents
dined at a nearby restaurant. The girl was just days shy
of her fourth birthday.
The discovery last week of a blond girl aged 5 or 6
living with a Roma couple in Greece who proved not to
be her biological parents thrust the issue of missing
children into the spotlight.
Kate and Gerry McCann told UK media last week that
the news from Greece gave them "great hope" that
their own daughter, who would now be 10 years old,
could be found alive.
About 10 cases of missing children around the world
are "being taken very seriously" in connection with the
Greek girl's case, including children from the United
States, Canada, Poland and France, a spokesman for a
Greek children's charity said.
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