Madeleine search to enter ‘substantial phase’
Assistant commissioner Mark Rowley of Scotland Yard said that officers are working through every credible line of inquiry in the search for the missing girl, as part of the “slog of a major investigation”.
He said: “In the forthcoming weeks we are going to be going to a substantial phase of operational activity on the ground in Portugal.”
He stressed: “It’s something that you would expect in any major inquiry. A thorough serious crime investigation works systematically through all the credible possibilities, and often in an investigation you will have more than one credible possibility.
“Therefore just because we’re doing a substantial phase of work in the forthcoming week doesn’t mean that it’s going to immediately lead to answers that will explain everything.”
British police are currently running their own investigation into what happened to Madeleine, who vanished from Portuguese holiday resort Praia da Luz in May 2007.
The Portuguese have now also re-opened their inquiry, and while they are working with the UK force, have refused to set up an official joint investigation.
Mr Rowley echoed Kate McCann’s calls for restraint in media coverage of the case, and said: “I want to be able to go back to Kate and Gerry at some stage in the future and tell them we’ve got to the bottom of this, or second best is to go back to them and say we’ve turned over every stone and we can’t get to an answer sometimes.”
A number of officers from Scotland Yard are hoping to be involved in the latest phase of activity.
One line of inquiry for Scotland Yard is a lone male paedophile who staged a series of sex attacks on young British girls while they were on holiday in the Algarve.
They are looking at nine sexual assaults and three “near misses” on British girls aged six to 12 between 2004 and 2006, including one in 2005 on a 10-year-old girl in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine vanished two years later.
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