Friday May 3 has seen the habitual flurry of news stories on missing Madeleine McCann – but nothing has been more ‘sensational’ than the report in a Portuguese tabloid newspaper claiming PJ police have a new suspect in the frame.
Correio da Manhã suggests there is suddenly a whole new set of clues which has seen manpower beefed as the PJ works in “absolute secrecy”.
This is the 12th anniversary of the most baffling missing persons case of modern times – and by coincidence the Resident was informed last week by a independent source investigating the mystery that he had passed new information to lead Portuguese investigator, Drª Helena Monteiro, working out of the PJ headquarters in Porto.
Our source told us that he had spoken on the telephone from Holland with Monteiro for over 40 minutes.
Whether his information may have tipped the balance is not clear, but the book he brought out with his findings has now been uploaded online (click here).
Says CM, the new theory does not focus on any involvement by Maddie’s parents Kate and Gerry McCann who have endured endless criticism over social media since their daughter’s disappearance from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz exactly 12 years ago.
“The Public Ministry admits these new lines of investigation are strong and could lead to clearing up the case altogether”, says the paper.
However, “even within the kidnap scenario” now being probed “authorities are very doubtful” that Madeleine – who would be 15 now, close to her 16th birthday – “is still alive”.
UK papers have picked up CM’s exclusive which comes hot-on-the-heels of a Netflix documentary aired last month.
Elsewhere, other media sources have said that police in the UK investigating the case are due to request another tranche of funding.
So far in England, the Maddie investigation (Operation Grange) is understood to have cost almost £12 million.
In Portugal it is much more difficult to come up with a total for funds spent as detectives tasked with investigating have a block budget that caters for other missing persons cases at the same time.
The Maddie case was reopened in Portugal two years after Grange’s inception in 2011.
