Police in Spain probe Madeleine ‘sighting’

The Madeleine McCann mystery took a twist yesterday as it emerged Spanish police are looking into a reported sighting of the missing girl in a Costa del Sol holiday resort.

Detectives are making inquiries in Nerja after a tip-off from colleagues in Portugal. Portuguese police are understood to have received details from an informant about a lookalike who was spotted in the town near Málaga.

Officers from a specialist unit are said to have been mobilised after being sent details of the sighting.

The development is thought to be connected to a new review of the girl’s disappearance.

A new squad of officers from the city of Porto have been instructed to go over the thousands of pages of case files and search for new clues.

The officers are working with a Scotland Yard team set up in May last year to review the probe into Madeleine’s May 2007 disappearance from the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz.

Malaga-based daily Diario Sur said the fresh inquiries in Spain were being carried out by officers from the Judicial Police’s central specialised and violent crime unit.

Officers from the unit are currently searching for two siblings who disappeared in a park in Cordoba, southern Spain, on Oct 8.

The youngsters’ dad, Jose Breton, was arrested in relation to their disappearance and is being held in prison.

Police have failed to find any trace of Ruth, six, and Jose, two, despite several searches of a family home with radar equipment.

Rogerio Alves, the McCanns’ lawyer, described the Portuguese police case review as a “very positive sign”. He said when news emerged of the creation of the new team: “Obviously the most plausible explanation for what’s happening is that information passed to or acquired by the Judicial Police in Porto has put them on the trail of something specific.”

It is understood that Scotland Yard detectives are liaising with their Spanish counterparts about the latest lead.

Madeleine was nearly four when she went missing on May 3, 2007.