The Observer

Madeleine McCann vanishes

The woman's name was Kate McCann. And when she returned to apartment 5A in the Ocean Club resort in the Algarve village of Praia da Luz, she discovered that her three-year-old daughter Madeleine was gone. She raised the alarm - she had not 'a shadow of a doubt' Madeleine had been abducted, she said later. Within hours, the resort staff, other holidaymakers and members of Luz's expatriate British community embarked on a frantic search. And barely had the first photographs of the angelic-looking little girl appeared than a media army descended. The intersection outside the McCann apartment took on the appearance of a superpower summit. "

Since Portuguese law barred police from giving information about an ongoing investigation, local tabloids, translated and amplified by overseas reporters, filled the vacuum. One report, days after Madeleine's disappearance, claimed the police were 'within hours' of bringing the girl back safe and sound - a tale that so infuriated official spokesman Olegario de Sousa that he told me: 'The police are parents, too! Do they [the press] really think that if we knew where the girl was we wouldn't have gone and brought her home?'

Months later came a sudden, startling series of developments. DNA samples from the McCann flat and a car they'd rented weeks after the disappearance were reported to suggest Madeleine's body had been present in both. But a Portuguese police source cautioned The Observer that while tests on the samples, carried out at Britain's leading forensic lab, had shown a 'match' with Madeleine, the material was so degraded that only 15 of 20 DNA 'markers' could be compared. That, he said, and the possibility of 'contamination' meant that media suggestions that the toddler's body had been carried in the rental car were wildly speculative and almost certainly wrong.

Still, days later, Kate and her husband Gerry were again questioned and this time made arguidos - mainly, the source suggested, because of 'contradictions' in their and their friends' testimony about what had happened on 3 May.

A new, high-powered Portuguese police team was put in charge. The flat was searched again. Alibis were rechecked, mobile phone records pored over, and plans reportedly afoot to question further a range of people - including Murat and the McCanns, all of whom have strongly protested their innocence of any involvement. Yet with the local press suggesting that barring a breakthrough, the police will decide whether to 'archive' the case in the new year, the investigators appear left with three arguidos, no conclusive forensic proof against any of them, one missing girl, no body, and no sign of an immediate resolution of a heartbreaking mystery that continues to transfix people around the world.