POLICE are investigating a childless couple who they suspect could have abducted missing Madeleine McCann.
The pair, who had told friends they would kidnap a child after becoming frustrated with adoption red tape, are among the list of 38 new suspects drawn up by British cops.
A review by London’s Metropolitan police led them to the couple and detectives are now investigating the theory that they smuggled the missing toddler out of Portugal aboard a boat.
The man had inherited a large amount of money around the time Maddie disappeared on May 3, 2007, from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, and it’s believed he could have used the money to set up a new life.
And it’s the childless couple theory that is fuelling the last remaining hope that Maddie could still be alive.
This week cops said there is still no proof she is dead.
Other theories centered around paedophile gangs and lone sex offenders, but the investigation is now focusing on one individual who, having struggled with adoption procedures in Portugal, threatened to kidnap a child.
The individual is believed to have told friends that he was so frustrated with adoption procedures in a number of countries that “he would take his own child” if necessary.
The Metropolitan Police have been aware of this line of inquiry for the past two years, but it’s only since British PM David Cameron ordered a fresh review that they had the resources to follow it up independently of the Portuguese authorities.
Sources close to the new investigation have told the Sunday World that they believe Madeleine was stalked and targeted for abduction in the days before she disappeared.
The English suspect, who has never been interviewed by UK or Portuguese Police officers, is understood to have been driving a four-wheel drive car at the time of the kidnapping.
The theory suggests that the planned abduction of Maddie involved at least two people and it is claimed that the suspect used a newly-purchased yacht, which was moored about an hour away from Praia da Luz, to leave the country.
Scotland Yard officers involved in the new probe also believe that it is likely the suspect had somehow accessed a key to apartment 5A, where the McCanns stayed with their three children.
The new review – launched in 2011 amid frustration with the bungling of the original investigation, which saw the McCanns wrongly identified as suspects in their daughter’s disappearance – has discovered 195 new leads and 38 persons of interest, including known sex offenders who were in the country at the time.
The Scotland Yard team of up to 37 detectives have re-interviewed the McCanns and their friends who holidayed together and who were eating at the tapas bar in the resort when Maddie went missing. None of them are among the list of 38 individuals police confirmed.
Police also reviewed over 30,000 documents from the Portuguese authorities and material gained from the private investigators hired by the McCanns over the last six years.
The Metropolitan Police team has declared that the “new witnesses and new evidence” points to a likelihood that Maddie is alive and is being held captive in a similar vein to the spate of recovered childhood kidnap victims that have been discovered in Austria and in the US.[/color]
The McCanns and the Met officers have taken hope from these horrific cases and point most recently to the case of Cleveland monster Ariel Castro (52), who kept three young girls captive for a decade until cries for help from one of his victims, Amanda Berry, revealed their existence to the world.
Operation Grange’s Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, who is leading the new inquiry, says: “The review has given us new thinking, new theories, new evidence and new witnesses.”
The force is understood to have reviewed material from top-secret US spy satellites, which were recording material near the resort where Madeleine McCann disappeared five years ago.
The spy cameras, which can detect the number plate of a car from five miles up, had been denied to the Portuguese authorities, but details of it have been confidentially released to the UK review team to help them with the latest enquiry.
The satellite information – which will be used to help identify cars around the Mark Warner complex – was used to check out a red car which was spotted by witnesses on the night and has now been used to review movement related to the 4x4 vehicle.
Clarence Mitchell, the former BBC reporter and spokesperson for parents Kate and Gerry McCann said: “It was a big step forward in establishing what happened and, hopefully, in bringing to justice whoever is responsible for Madeleine’s abduction.”
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OK
1) The theory is now that a desperate childless couple who couldnt wait for a child went to extreme measures to get one, but, also wanted a child to keep in a dungeon as a sex slave? Did I miss something.
2) When did the Met say what I have bolded in red?
3) US spy satellites reading car number plates? Hogwash I think. As is the suggestion they denied the PT authorities these images,if they exist, but just handed them over to the British when asked.
4) Examples quoted were of teenagers taken, kept for sexual abuse and child rearing, not three yr olds!
