A vast reservoir near to the town where Madeleine McCann went missing is set to
be trawled as police relaunch an active search for her.
The new inquiry head has now tripled the size of his team in a bid to crack the
case and ordered fresh searches of a 10 mile area around the holiday town of Praia da Luz from where
she disappeared five months ago.
A search is also expected of the dense woodland and isolated dwellings around
the reservoir - known locally as Barragem da Bravura, literally the Reservoir
of the Wilderness - which leading detective Paulo Rebelo believes was not
combed carefully enough in the days following the four-year-old's
disappearance.
According to Portuguese newspaper the Correio Da Manha, the
"meticulous" Rebelo has ordered his reinforced team to pay
"special attention" to the area around the jagged reservoir, which
has a 25 mile perimeter, and is 15 miles from Luz.
Sites to the south of the Ocean Club where the McCanns and their friends
stayed, including Luz and Burgau beaches, are also to be "fine
combed" by inspectors, who will particularly focus on spots where the
British group used their mobile telephones.
These are the first significant searches for three months. Detectives have
already revisited the family's rented apartment and the tapas bar where they
dined on May 3, the night Madeleine disappeared, and this weekend began a
review of the case files, looking for loose ends.
A friend of Kate and Gerry McCann said: "Any widening of the search area
is encouraging and we would welcome that. It does sound as though there is more
vigour in that aspect of the inquiry which is good."
He added that while it would be a "tragedy" for the family if police
searches eventually yield the little girl's body, at least it would help lift
the cloud of suspicion from them.
"If she is dead then she is dead but not by their hand," he said.
Another friend dismissed a report this weekend about suspicious footprints in
the McCanns' apartment and the car they hired 25 days after Madeleine went
missing as being like "something out of an Agatha Christie novel".
"It doesn't imply guilt in any shape or form," she said. "There
are a lot of perfectly good reasons why a footprint of that nature might be
found."
Newspapers cited a report on results due back from the Forensic Science Service
in Birmingham
this week that detailed a footprint in the apartment which had specks of
unidentified blood in it, linking this to a potentially matching footprint
above the bumper of the McCanns' car.
But an FSS source said: "The simple fact is, as was the case before, the
results are not conclusive."
Meanwhile, it emerged that Kate and Gerry McCann, both 39-year-old doctors from
Rothley in Leicestershire, could be the only official suspects in their
daughter's disappearance within a month.
According to British expatriate Robert Murat's lawyer, Francisco Pagarete:
"It's possible that in the next four weeks his status will be cleared
because we will have reached six months since he has been a suspect in this
case."
He said the District Attorney could still step in to increase the time limit
detectives have to decide about their suspects, but added: "If they
consider that the situation with regards to my client his already been resolved
then his status will be lifted and he can get on with his life. It's just a
question of waiting." |
