Portuguese police resume search for missing British child Madeleine McCann since 2007

alley dam – Portuguese police on Tuesday, with the help of German and British colleagues, resumed the search for Madeline McCann, a British child who went missing 16 years ago in the country’s southern Algarve region.

20-30, including uniformed police, in an area near Aladedam, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Praia da Luz, where a three-year-old boy was last seen alive in 2007. A police officer was seen.

Portuguese police set up a blue-based tent, barring media and the public from entering. Witnesses said police began searching an area several kilometers from the tent just before 8 am on Tuesday. A dozen cars and police vans were seen arriving in the area.

The Portuguese Judicial Police issued a statement on Monday that it would resume the search at the request of German authorities and with the cooperation of British authorities.

The German prosecutor’s office in Braunschweig said in a written statement on Tuesday that “criminal proceedings are currently taking place in Portugal as part of the investigation into the Madeleine McCann case.”

It added, “This measure is being implemented with mutual legal assistance from the Portuguese prosecutor’s office, with the assistance of officials from the Federal Criminal Police Service.”

“For investigative tactical reasons, detailed background information is not available at this time,” the statement said.

In mid-2020, German authorities announced that a 45-year-old German national identified by the media as Christian Bruckner, who was in the Algarve in 2007, was the suspect in the case. Bruckner has denied any involvement.

Brückner is currently serving a seven-year sentence in Germany for a rape committed in Portugal in 2005.

He is under investigation for murder in the McCann case, but has not been charged. He spent many years in Portugal, including in Praia da Luz, around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.

The case has sparked global interest for several years, with reports of sightings of her traveling as far as Australia, and numerous books and television documentaries about the case.

Madeleine, now 20, has been rewarded millions of dollars for her discovery.

British, Portuguese and German police are still trying to figure out what happened on the night of May 3, 2007, when a toddler disappeared from bed at a resort in southern Portugal. She was in the same room with her twin brother, who was two years old at the time, and her sister. Her parents were having dinner with her friends at a nearby restaurant then.