Thirty-eight potential suspects have been identified in the abduction of Madeleine McCann, Scotland Yard said yesterday as it launched a final push to uncover the mystery of the 3-year-old's disappearance on a family holiday in Portugal six years ago.
The potential suspects include 12 Britons believed to have been in the resort town Praia de Luz in 2007 when the youngster disappeared from the bedroom of her holiday villa. Upgrading the case from a review to an investigation, the Metropolitan Police are set to apply to Portugal and three other unidentified European countries for information on individuals following a two-year trawl of thousands of documents collected during years of fruitless attempts to find the girl.
The step change in the inquiry comes after Home Secretary Theresa May responded to a 2011 plea for help from the family, ordering a review of files compiled by police in Portugal and Britain and by seven firms of private investigators.
Now, Scotland Yard's upgrade allows them to apply to other countries for information on suspects and ask them to act on new witness evidence, leads and theories identified during the review.
If any of the 12 Britons, some of whom live abroad, are eventually charged with an offence, they could go on trial in Britain. The decision to upgrade the case was taken after the Portuguese authorities declined to reopen their inquiry shelved in 2008.
The unusual arrangement - which will see a small number of Metropolitan Police officers work alongside their Portuguese counterparts - is seen as the last realistic prospect of uncovering what happened to Madeleine.
Arrests are not imminent in the McCann case but the multimillion-dollar review by 37 officers is believed to have uncovered new theories about events on the night she disappeared. Scotland Yard declined to go into detail but said they believed the youngster may still be alive because of a lack of evidence to suggest otherwise. She would be 10 years old now.
Madeleine was asleep in the family's holiday apartment as her parents dined at a nearby restaurant with friends when she was taken. Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and their friends have been ruled out as suspects, leading police to believe she was snatched by a stranger.
After Portuguese police failed to find the girl, the McCanns employed private investigators. The Government is funding the review and will continue to pay for the full inquiry. Police have gone through nearly two-thirds of the papers in a laborious process of translation and logging more than 30,000 documents.
Some of the 38 identified have not previously featured in inquiries into the girl's disappearance, marked over the years by sightings across Europe and further afield, even in New Zealand, and by dogged campaigning by the girl's parents.
The Portuguese authorities have said they will only open the inquiry in the event of a substantial breakthrough. In a delicate diplomatic balancing act, Portuguese police will lead the latest inquiry but will be following up some of the 3800 leads identified by the Met in the review.
The officer heading Operation Grange, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, said: "We continue to believe that there is a possibility that Madeleine is alive. It's a positive step in our hunt for Madeleine that our understanding of the evidence has enabled us to shift from review to investigation."
- Independent