Madeleine McCann's parents cling to hope, a year on

Agence France-Presse
First Posted 13:19:00 05/03/2008

LONDON -- The anguished parents of missing British four-year-old Madeleine McCann insist they have not given up hope, a year after their lives were shattered when she vanished from their Portugal holiday flat.

Far from it: as they prepared for the anniversary this weekend, Gerry and Kate McCann hoped to reinvigorate their high-profile campaign to find their daughter alive.

"I don't feel as if Madeleine is dead," said her 40-year-old mother, insisting the chances of finding Madeleine alive are "as good now, if not better" than immediately after her disappearance.

"I really feel she is out there and we will find her," she added.

Madeleine went missing on May 3, days before her fourth birthday as her parents dined with friends in the Portuguese beach resort of Praia da Luz. Her younger brother and sister were in the room too, but they did not wake.

Despite a number of reported sightings, Madeleine has never been found, while her parents were made formal suspects in the Portuguese police probe last September, triggering their return to Britain.

Much media attention has focused on their suspect status, even if they recently won more than 500,000 pounds (one million dollars) in compensation from a newspaper that repeatedly alleged they were implicated.

Now, a year, on, they want to refocus on finding their daughter.

Gerry McCann, 39, who like his wife is a doctor, said the couple were determined to create something positive from their personal agony by their ongoing campaign to introduce a network to find missing children in Europe.

"We knew the night she was taken that some children are murdered and, of course, that was our worst fear," he told Hello magazine, in a joint interview to mark the anniversary.

But, said his wife: "The chances of her being alive are as good now, if not better, than they were after the first three days of her going missing."

Madeleine's uncle, John McCann, told AFP the family were frustrated by a lack of information from Portugal.

"The investigation is being run by the Portuguese police and we don't know what they are doing because of their secrecy laws," he said, while voicing hope that at least the couple's suspect status could be lifted.

"It's a dreadful thing to have a child abducted and then to be suspected of involvement in it, so to have that cleared up would be a first step," he said.

He, and not Madeleine's parents, would visit Praia da Luz for Saturday's anniversary "to thank the Portuguese people for their help".

There will also be church services on the anniversary in Gerry's home town of Glasgow, in Liverpool and in Rothley, the small town in Leicestershire, central England, where the family live.

The campaign to find Madeleine has become a massive media operation, fuelled by huge interest in Britain and abroad.

Clarence Mitchell, a former BBC reporter who has become the the family's spokesman, said Madeleine's parents were optimistic about the first anniversary.

"Kate and Gerry are buoyant in a sense as they see this as another opportunity to highlight the campaign and their desire for greater change in the wider area (of finding missing children)," he said.

"They feel quite resilient and quite strong but of course that is mixed with agony that their daughter hasn't been found.

"A little girl is missing, and we need to focus on the search for her, that is our message."

Recent events have demonstrated how hard it is to keep the McCanns' carefully managed media campaign on track.

On the day they went to Brussels to call for a Europe-wide alert system for abducted children, similar to the Amber Alert programme in the United States, their witness statements to police were leaked from Portugal.

The statements gave a detailed account of how they had left Madeleine alone and crying the night before she disappeared.

An outraged Mitchell said the leak was an attempt to smear the couple -- a claim immediately rebuffed by Portuguese police, with whom their relations remain tense.