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. 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.
Big mystery
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.
“Very credible” informant
Between Tuesday and Thursday, investigators surveyed the excavation 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 have been collecting soil samples and collecting several scraps of cloth found at the site since the excavations began.