Eighteen-month old Daniel Abreu, the baby who went missing on Sunday afternoon in Madeira, was found alive and well on Wednesday morning.
The little boy, who apparently toddled out of the house into the street from which he disappeared without trace, was found by an irrigation canal.
Initial news reports suggested that the canal was near the house where Daniel went missing, but not in any of the areas originally searched by police.
Anyone following the mystery would have been surprised by the fact that police called off their hunt for Daniel less than 24-hours after it had begun.
As Correio da Manhã newspaper reported on Wednesday morning, inquiries were beginning to “tighten” on the parents – and they had been questioned for hours the day before.
Daniel’s father Carlos had gone so far as to criticise police for “not doing a good job” and “waiting for something to happen”, and neighbours had rallied to mount their own searches, Lusa news agency reported.
Early on Wednesday morning, when hopes for the little boy’s survival were fading, he was found, apparently “in perfectly good health”, by a man working on the irrigation canal in the nearby area of Levada Nova.
Daniel was then taken to hospital to be checked, but there appeared to be nothing wrong with him.
The mystery of those agonising missing hours has yet to be unravelled. The child’s disappearance was reported to police around 5pm on Sunday afternoon, but his family maintained they had already been looking for him for three hours. The baby in a nappy and sucking on a dummy appears to have been able to fend for himself, in winter, for what amounts to over 65 hours.
