MADELEINE MCCANN vanished from her bed while on holiday with her family in Portugal in 2007.
The little girl was last seen when she was just three years old and has never been found despite extensive searches.
Where did Madeleine McCann go missing?
Madeleine disappeared from her family’s holiday apartment in Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva, Praia da Luz, a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal.
She was on holiday with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann and younger siblings – twins Sean and Amelie – when she went missing.
The McCanns arrived at the location on April 28, 2007, for a seven-night break at the two-bedroom ground-floor apartment.
Madeleine vanished from the accommodation where she had been sleeping with her brother and sister on what was due to be the penultimate day of the McCann family holiday.
The children’s parents were at a nearby restaurant.
The three-year-old’s disappearance remains one of the most well-known missing person cases in British history.
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Where is the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz?
The apartment that Madeleine went missing from is on the edge of travel firm Mark Warner’s Ocean Club resort.
The Ocean Club is one of several tourist sites in the popular holiday town of Praia da Luz.
It is located close to the larger town of Lagos which is about an hour’s drive from Faro airport.
In February 2017 the apartment was sold to a British gran for £113,000 – half the asking price.
When did Madeleine McCann disappear?
Madeleine vanished on May 3, 2007, after Kate and Gerry left her and her siblings sleeping in their apartment while they dined at a nearby tapas bar.
Kate discovered that Madeleine was not in her bed when she returned to check on the kids at around 10pm that evening.
Gerry and Kate were named as “arguidos” – people being questioned under caution – by Portuguese police in September 2007 but the following the summer they were cleared by investigators who declared they had exhausted all avenues in the case.
Scotland Yard launched its own review into the case, named Operation Grange, in 2011 at the behest of then-home secretary Theresa May.
Two years later Scotland Yard said it had uncovered new leads while Portuguese police reopened their case.
Operation Grange was scaled down from 29 detectives to just four in October 2015 but the following year the Tory Government injected extra funding into the operation as cops investigated a new theory that Maddie was snatched by a human trafficking ring.
Police said in October 2017 that they were hunting a “person of significance” and in the November of that year a new line of inquiry saw investigators travel to Bulgaria to try and track down a paedophile’s widow.
In March 2018 Scotland Yard won Home Office funding to continue chasing a vital “final line of inquiry” for a further six months.
Following the conclusion of that six-month period a formal request was made to the Home Office for a further six months of funding.
In 2022 Portuguese police formally named convicted rapist Christian Brueckner as the main suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance.
In May 2023 it was revealed that police had launched a major search for Madeleine’s body at a remote reservoir where Christian is said to have visited.
Brueckner is believed to have used the Arade Dam, a 45-minute drive from the Ocean Club holiday resort where Madeleine vanished from, and is reported to have called it his “little paradise”.
The search ended after three days on May 25, 2023, but it is not known what police uncovered.
Predator Brueckner was in court in Braunschweig, Germany in February 2024.
He faced claims that he raped three women and twice sexually molested children in Portugal.
Brueckner was born in Germany in 1976 and moved to Portugal in his late teens.
He is serving a prison sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in 2005 and is believed to have a total of 17 convictions against him including burglary.
How old would Madeleine McCann be now?
Madeleine’s 20th birthday was on May 12, 2023.
On her birthday the McCann family marked the occasion on their website.
They wrote at the time: “Happy birthday Madeleine!
“We love you and we’re waiting for you. We’re never going to give up.”
In April 2012 UK police released a computer-generated image of Madeleine showing what she would look like aged nine.