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Met police Maddie squad fly to Portugal for first time
More than four years after she vanished, officers from Scotland Yard have held talks with Portuguese police
POLICE officers from Scotland Yard investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann have held their first face-to-face meetings with the Portuguese authorities as they probe the case.
It is more than four years since the schoolgirl vanished during a family holiday to the Algarve and a team of around 30 detectives is looking at the way the case was handled after Prime Minister David Cameron and the Home Office ordered a review in May this year.
The officers travelled to Portugal last month for what a Scotland Yard spokesman called "their first formal meeting with Portuguese authorities".
Although the Portuguese police worked closely with officers from the McCanns' home county of Leicestershire in the aftermath of Madeleine's disappearance, their inquiry was shelved in 2008.
Since then no police force has been actively looking for her, and although there have been hundreds of supposed sightings around the world of Madeleine, who would now be eight, nothing has ever come of them.
The girl's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, were said to be "extremely pleased" that members of the Met squad had travelled to Portugal and said they were hoping for positive developments. Their spokesman Clarence Mitchell said it was a "step in the right direction".
The Prime Minister ordered the Scotland Yard review in May, four years after Madeleine vanished. He said the aim was to bring "new perspective" to the investigation, which never managed to establish what had happened to the youngster. ·
