FILIPE AMORIM / AFP
Portuguese police searching for leads leading to Maddie McCann’s disappearance, May 25, 2023.
INTERNATIONAL – Will we finally find out more about Maddie’s disappearance? The Portuguese police announced that this Thursday, May 25, they have completed the excavations near a lake in southern Portugal, carried out since Tuesday at the request of the German authorities, as part of the investigation into the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann in 2007 .
Criminal Police said in a press release that “the material collected will be handed over to the German authorities,” who since 2020 have claimed they are convinced of the British girl’s death and suspect a German multiple-recidivist sex offender already jailed in the country for a rape in Portugal. .
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Police gave no details on the items collected or the purpose of the operation, which was carried out on the banks of a water reservoir in Silves, a municipality in the Algarve’s tourist region, with the involvement of German and British investigators.
The police are looking for Maddie’s pajamas
What we do know, however, is that between Tuesday and Thursday, investigators surveyed the dig area using dogs, a drone and a caterpillar brush cutter. Some parts of the country have been combed with probes, shovels and rakes.
According to local media, investigators collected soil samples and collected several scraps of fabric found at the site. According to local press, police were also looking for a pink blanket or the pajamas Maddie was wearing the night of her disappearance.
The Portuguese weekly Expresso says that it was the testimony of an informant whom the German investigators considered “very credible” that prompted them to take a renewed interest in the site.
A source familiar with the investigation told SkyNews that nothing significant had been found. German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolter stated that investigators are “obviously still looking for the body,” but “not only that, there are other things.” Any discovery like a piece of clothing could help.”
German suspected of murder
On May 3, 2007, just before celebrating her fourth birthday, Madeleine McCann disappeared from a room in a hotel complex in Praia da Luz, a small seaside resort in the Algarve, where she was vacationing with her family while her parents were having dinner with friends nearby restaurant.
The British girl’s disappearance sparked an extraordinary international campaign led by Kate and Gerry McCann to find her and remains one of the great criminal mysteries of recent years.
The area of the Arade Dam, about fifty kilometers from the site of “Maddie’s” disappearance, had already been raked in 2008, including by divers who had found only animal remains. According to local media, the German suspect went there regularly and described the place as his “little paradise”.
This man, who is serving a prison sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal, was identified by German investigators in 2020 as Christian Brueckner, a now 46-year-old and lifelong pedophile in the Algarve for several years.
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