Arrest possible as Madeleine hunt enters ‘decisive phase’
It is 110 days since the four-year-old was snatched from her bed in her family’s holiday apartment in the Algarve seaside village of Praia da Luz.
Preliminary DNA tests on blood specks found by dogs in the McCanns’ apartment revealed they came from a man and the full forensic results will be returned “imminently”.
A spokeswoman for the Forensic Science Service (FSS) in Birmingham, which is analysing the samples, said only that the tests were “ongoing”.
Unconfirmed reports in Portuguese and British papers yesterday suggested police will step up the hunt for the young girl this week by launching a series of new searches.
And a possible suspect is under surveillance in Britain and could be arrested within days, Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manha claimed.
The paper said the return of the DNA test results from the FSS could be “decisive” for the investigation.
Madeleine’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, are starting to think about returning to Britain with their two-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie.
The couple have remained in Praia da Luz since Madeleine went missing on May 3, only leaving Portugal to publicise the campaign to find her. But they have not yet set a date to come back to Britain and will not necessarily return next month.
It has been reported that Portuguese police plan to re-interview a pensioner who says she disturbed an intruder in her apartment directly above the McCanns’ holiday flat two weeks before Madeleine vanished.
This is not the first report of a break-in at the Ocean Club complex in Praia da Luz in recent months.
One Briton who owns a flat just 100m from the McCanns’ apartment said he suspected there were “a lot” of opportunistic burglaries in the resort.
