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 McCanns arrived on 28 April 2007 for their seven-night spring break in Praia da Luz, a village in Portugal's Algarve region with a population of 1,000, known as "Little Britain" because of the concentration of British homeowners and holidaymakers.

Tanner described the man as white, dark-haired, 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m) tall, of southern European or Mediterranean appearance, 35–40 years old, wearing gold or beige trousers and a dark jacket, and said he did not look like a tourist.

[64] Police did not request motorway surveillance pictures of vehicles leaving Praia da Luz the night of the disappearance, or of the road between Lagos and Vila Real de Santo António on the Spanish border.

In an interview for Anthony Summers's and Robbyn Swan's book Looking for Madeleine (2014), Jim Gamble, head of CEOP at the time, said Portuguese police felt they were being condescended to, and that the British were acting as a "colonial power".

[91] Throughout May and June the couple's PR team arranged events to sustain media interest in the case, including a visit to the Portuguese city of Fátima[37] as well as trips to Holland, Germany, Spain,[92] and Morocco.

[122][123] On 30 June a 3,000-word article entitled "The Madeleine Case: A Pact of Silence" appeared in Sol, a Portuguese weekly, stating that the McCanns were suspects, highlighting alleged inconsistencies between their statements and implying that the Tanner sighting had been invented.

[53] Particularly from August onwards, these suspicions developed into the theory that Madeleine had died in apartment 5A as a result of an accident—perhaps after being sedated to help her stay asleep—and that her parents had hidden her body for a month, before retrieving her and driving her to an unknown place in a car they had hired over three weeks after the disappearance.

[5][132] In 2010, Carlos Anjos, former head of the Police Detectives Union in Portugal, told the BBC programme Panorama that most Portuguese investigators still believed Madeleine had died as a result of an accident in the apartment.

[139][138] Keela was a forensic investigation dog trained to give her handler, Martin Grime, a "passive alert" to the scent of human blood by placing her nose close to the spot, then freezing in that position.

[143] The PJ obtained warrants to search the house the McCanns had rented on Rua das Flores, and the silver Renault Scénic the couple had hired 24 days after Madeleine went missing.

Hair and other fibres were collected from areas in the car and apartment 5A where Keela and Eddie had given alerts, and were sent to the Forensic Science Service (FSS) in Birmingham for DNA profiling, arriving around 8 August 2007.

[53] On 8 August, without waiting for the results from Birmingham, Portuguese police called the McCanns to a meeting in Portimão, where Guilhermino Encarnação, PJ regional director, and Luis Neves, coordinator of the Direcção Central de Combate ao Banditismo in Lisbon, told them the case was now a murder inquiry.

[d] Matt Baggott of the Leicestershire Police told the inquiry that, because the Portuguese were in charge of the case, he had made a decision not to correct reporters; his force's priority, he said, was to maintain a good relationship with the PJ with a view to finding Madeleine.

[171][86] On 11 September the public prosecutor, José Cunha de Magalhães e Meneses, handed the ten-volume case file to a judge, Pedro Miguel dos Anjos Frias.

The cable said: "Without delving into the details of the case, Ellis admitted that the British police had developed the current evidence against the McCann parents, and he stressed that authorities from both countries were working co-operatively.

On 2 October 2007 Chief Inspector Gonçalo Amaral was removed from his post as the inquiry's coordinator and transferred to Faro after telling the newspaper Diário de Notícias that British police had only pursued leads helpful to the McCanns.

[185] The poor relationship between the McCanns and Portuguese police was evident again that month when, on the day the couple were at the European Parliament to promote a monitoring system for missing children, transcripts of their interviews with the PJ were leaked to Spanish television.

[242][243][244][245] On 11 May 2011, as it was serializing Kate's book, Madeleine, the front page of The Sun hosted an open letter from the McCanns in which they asked Prime Minister David Cameron to set up a new inquiry; 20,000 people signed the newspaper's petition that day.

[267] Scotland Yard issued another appeal in March 2014 for information about a man who had entered holiday homes occupied by British families in four incidents in the western region of Algarve between 2004 and 2006, two of them in Praia da Luz.

[269] In June 2014, officers from Scotland Yard and the PJ, accompanied by archaeologists and sniffer dogs, searched drains and dug in 60,000 square metres (15 acres) of wasteland in Praia da Luz.

[275] Brückner has previously been convicted of unrelated counts of child sexual abuse and drug trafficking, and has since 2019 served a prison sentence in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American pensioner in the Algarve region.

[279] Brückner, who is believed to have been living in a borrowed VW camper van in the Algarve region at the time of Madeleine's disappearance, was ordered to be investigated regarding possible involvement by the public prosecutor in the Braunschweig court.

[294] In the early days of the inquiry, Portuguese police searched through images seized from paedophile investigations, and Madeleine's parents were shown photographs of sex offenders in case they recognised them from Praia de Luz.

In May 2009, investigators working for the McCanns tried to question one, Raymond Hewlett; he had allegedly told someone he knew what happened to Madeleine, but he retracted his statement and died of cancer in Germany in December of that year.

[297] A man from Northern Ireland who died in 2013 was discussed in the media in connection with the disappearance: after being released from prison for the sexual assault of his four daughters, he had moved to the Portuguese town of Carvoeiro, approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) from Praia da Luz; he was there when Madeleine went missing.

[304] Social media's attacks included a threat to kidnap one of the McCanns' twins,[199] and when Scotland Yard and Crimewatch staged their reconstruction in 2013, there was apparently talk of phoning in with false information to sabotage the appeal.

[310] They were harshly criticised for having left their children alone in an unlocked apartment, despite the availability of Ocean Club babysitters and a crèche; the argument ran that a working-class couple would have faced child abandonment charges.

[314] She had apparently been advised by abduction experts not to cry on camera because the kidnapper might enjoy her distress, and this led to more criticism: the Portuguese tabloid Correio da Manhã cited sources complaining that she had not "shed a single tear".

Interviewees included Jim Gamble, former head of CEOP; Alan Johnson, former British home secretary; Brian Kennedy, the British businessman who supported the McCanns financially; Justine McGuiness, the McCanns' former spokesperson; Gonçalo Amaral, former head of the PJ investigation; Robert Murat, the first arguido; Julian Peribañez, a former Método 3 private investigator; Sandra Felgueiras, a Portuguese journalist who covered the disappearance; and Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, authors of Looking for Madeleine (2014).