Disappearance of Madeleine McCann

Madeleine Beth McCann (born 12 May 2003) is a British missing person, who at the age of 3 disappeared from her bed in a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Lagos, Portugal, on the evening of 3 May 2007. ''The Daily Telegraph'' described her disappearance as "the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history". Madeleine's whereabouts remain unknown, although German prosecutors believe she is dead.

Madeleine was on holiday from the United Kingdom with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann, her two-year-old twin siblings, and a group of family friends and their children. The McCann children had been left asleep at 20:30 in the ground-floor apartment while their parents dined with friends in a restaurant away. The parents checked on the children throughout the evening, until Kate discovered Madeleine was missing at 22:00. Over the following weeks, particularly on the basis of their interpretation of a British DNA analysis, the Portuguese police came to believe that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment and her parents had covered it up. The McCanns were given ''arguido'' (suspect) status in September 2007, which was lifted when Portugal's attorney general archived the case in July 2008 for lack of evidence.

Madeleine's parents continued the investigation using private detectives until the Metropolitan Police opened its own inquiry, Operation Grange, in 2011. The senior investigating officer announced that he was treating the disappearance as "a criminal act by a stranger", most likely a planned abduction or burglary gone wrong. In 2013, the Met released e-fit images of men they wanted to trace, including one of a man seen carrying a child toward the beach on the night Madeleine vanished. Shortly after this, Portuguese police reopened their inquiry. Operation Grange was scaled back in 2015, but the remaining detectives continued to pursue a small number of inquiries described in April 2017 as significant. In 2020, German authorities declared Christian Brückner their prime suspect for the abduction and murder of McCann, but charges have yet to be formalised.

Madeleine's disappearance attracted sustained press coverage both in the UK and internationally, reminiscent of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. Her parents were subjected to intense scrutiny and faced accusations of involvement in the disappearance,, ''The Guardian'', 27 April 2012 * Brian Cathcart (''New Statesman'', 22 October 2008): "[T]he McCann case was the greatest scandal in our news media in at least a decade ... Error on this scale, involving hundreds of 'completely untrue' news reports, published on front pages month after month in the teeth of desperate denials, can only be systemic. Judging by what appeared in print, it involved a reckless neglect of ethical standards, a persistent failure to apply even the most basic journalistic rigour, and plenty of plain cruelty."}} particularly in the tabloid press and on Twitter. In 2008, they and their travelling companions received damages and apologies from Express Newspapers as a result of false allegations of their involvement in Madeleine's death. In 2011, the McCanns testified before the Leveson Inquiry into British press misconduct, lending support to those arguing for tighter press regulation. Provided by Wikipedia