THE distraught parents of a three-year-old English girl believed to have been kidnapped while on holiday in Portugal were clinging to hope that she was still alive last night.

As a desperate hunt for Madeleine McCann continued in the Algarve, her mother relived the horrific moment she discovered her daughter had vanished from her bed while she and her husband were in a restaurant only 40 metres away.

The Daily Mail reported that Kate McCann ran from their apartment in an upmarket Portuguese resort screaming: "Someone has taken my little girl!"

Dr McCann and her cardiologist husband, Gerry, have told family and friends they suspect their daughter was snatched while her two-year-old twin brother and sister were asleep in cots on either side of her.

Madeleine, who was born through IVF, disappeared from the family's ground-floor holiday apartment at the Mark Warner holiday complex in the Praia da Luz resort as her parents ate at a tapas restaurant.

The child's aunt, Trish Cameron, said Madeleine's parents kept going back to check on the children every half-hour.

"He went back at nine o'clock to check the children. They were all sound asleep, windows shut, shutters shut," the aunt said.

Dr McCann later went over to the two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment and "came out screaming", Mrs Cameron said. "The door was lying open, the window in the bedroom and the shutters had been jemmied open.

"Nothing had been touched in the apartment, no valuables taken, no passports. They think someone must have come in the window and gone out the door with her."

Portuguese police sealed off the three-storey block and forensic specialists fingerprinted the ground-floor window of the McCanns' apartment. All airports, ports and border posts have been alerted.

Despite a massive search throughout the night by police, sniffer dogs and dozens of holidaymakers, there has been no sign of Madeleine, who was wearing white pyjamas.

 Source: The Sun-Herald