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LONDON - Chancellor Gordon Brown offered to help the family of Madeleine McCann today as they continued their search in Portugal for the missing four-year-old.
The girl's aunt Philomena McCann said Brown gave her "moral support", while Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told MPs the government was doing "everything it could to help".
Some MPs wore yellow ribbons in support of the family, who are enduring their 13th day since Madeleine was snatched from their villa on the Algarve in southern Portugal.
"Like everyone in the country, we hope and pray for the safe return of Madeleine," Prescott told parliament.
In Leicester, Gerry and Kate McCann's family, friends and colleagues launched a fund to help pay for the rising costs of the search.
"This fund will be a vehicle to help our family get our darling wee niece back," the girl's uncle John McCann told a news conference.
Former England rugby union captain Martin Johnson lent his support, saying: "As a parent, as a father, it really does hit home."
Portuguese police said on Tuesday they had identified a suspect in their investigation.
A day earlier, they searched a villa close to the complex from where Madeleine went missing and took away a British man, Robert Murat, for questioning.
"There is a suspect," a spokeswoman for the judicial police said but there is not enough evidence to make an arrest.
"The judicial police continue to follow the strongest lead and we hope that in the short term there will be more developments," chief inspector Olegario Sousa told a news conference.
Murat often spoke to reporters in the days just after the May 3 disappearance of Madeleine, saying she looked like his daughter in England.
His mother's house, "Casa Liliana," is about 150 metres from the resort apartment where the McCann family was staying when their daughter disappeared.
- REUTERS
