Detectives investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann have made a huge breakthrough 13 years after she disappeared.
The detectives revealed a new prime suspect in the case. The suspect is a 43-year-old German, currently in jail on an unrelated matter. He has not been named by British police but he was living in a campervan in Praia da Luz in Portugal around the time Maddie disappeared on May 3, 2007.
The Metropolitan Police revealed on Wednesday that the suspect took a 30-minute call to his Portuguese phone around an hour before the toddler was snatched from the holiday apartment where she was staying with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann and her young twin siblings, Sean and Amelie.
Madeleine McCann was just 3 at the time she disappeared from her bed in a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, in the Algarve region of Portugal on May 3, 2007. She had been left sleeping with her younger twin siblings while her parents were dining in a nearby tapas restaurant at their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz.
She would have turned 17 last month. Ahead of what would have been their daughter’s 17th birthday, her parents wrote: “It is now 13 years since we were last with Madeleine. Her 17th birthday is to follow in the next couple of weeks….the latter tangibly, painfully, bringing it home to us what we have missed and continue to miss as a family.”
Speaking on Wednesday at a press conference, Scotland Yard detectives who have led the hunt for the toddler, said the suspect had been living in the 1980s VW T3 Westfalia campervan in the Portuguese resort in the days before she vanished.
They added that the suspect is linked to a 1993 Jaguar XJR6 with a German number plate seen in Praia da Luz and surrounding areas in 2006 and 2007.
The day after Madeleine went missing, he got the car re-registered in Germany under someone else’s name, although it is believed the vehicle was still in Portugal.
Both the campervan and the Jaguar have been seized by German police, who say they are leading a murder investigation, although British police still insist it’s a missing person inquiry.
