KEY POINTS:
Chief fire officer Marcio Costa led a uniformed crew of nine into the forests above Praia Da Luz to begin their search for Madeline McCann in the Algarve's searing heat yesterday afternoon but he shook his head when asked why this desolate place, above the many others he
had just driven his truck through, should be selected.
"We're just following orders from the commander," he said before setting out with a scythe and a walkie talkie - no sniffer dogs - to comb the forest.
Mr Costa could be forgiven his pessimism.
His national fire service team had never been involved in a missing person's inquiry before and they seemed to have been drafted in by virtue of some recent training in surveillance techniques, designed to stop summer forest fires here.
The forest also seemed a place worth scouring - not for any hopeful reason but because it was in a place like it that the body of another British child who went missing in Portugal, nine-year-old Rachel Charles, was found 17 years ago.
"We'll just split the forest up and hope we find something," said Mr Costa.
The mounting sense of frustration was evident in the fields closer to Praia Da Luz, where four police officers who had fanned out across two acres of land behind a builder's yard were interrupted by stray dogs.
In the resort, where Madeleine went missing on Thursday, the investigation was also looking threadbare.
The area interdita police tape at the scene served no purpose, as the public ducked straight through it, past a Guarda Nacional Republica police van adorned with posters of the child issued by British newspapers.
Ex-pat Alison Castantiera, 35, a local waitress walking with her five-year-old son Ricardo, said the failure to find Madeleine was creating a sense of fear at the resort.
"It would just be nice to think that a woman who has had trouble having children might be responsible for this, rather than someone who might do her harm," she said.
Ms Castantiera has faith in the local police service but her own experiences on the night Madeleine went missing, as she waitressed at the local Eclipse restaurant, said everything about the chaos in the hours after she vanished.
"A barefoot man came running in at 11.30pm (nearly two hours after the child's disappearance) and was shouting 'Have you seen a little girl?"' said Ms Castantiera.
"He didn't have a photograph but said she had been with her two brothers which made me think she was being protected by two teenagers. That made me feel she'd be OK ."
It was the following day that she discovered Madeleine's twin siblings were a boy and girl, aged two and asleep when Madeleine went missing.
Ms Castantiera was speaking minutes after Madeleine's parents had emerged to make a private visit to the local Nossa Senhora Da Luz (Our Lady of Light) church, Mrs McCann clutching the favourite pink doll Madeleine knows as 'Cuddle Cat', to pray for her safe return.
There was no news for the couple from the depths of the forest last night.
After three hours, the fire service search was abandoned.
- INDEPENDENT
