New revelations in the 2007 disappearance of the 3-year-old British girl from a vacation home in Portugal have put the case back in the spotlight.
On Wednesday evening, the German and British authorities dropped a bombshell: They said a German man was under investigation on suspicion of the murder of Madeleine McCann, a 3-year-old British girl who disappeared from a hotel room in Portugal 13 years ago.
The disappearance of Madeleine, who was vacationing with her family in the seaside village of Praia da Luz, in Portugal’s Algarve region, sent shock waves across Europe, sparked an international manhunt and triggered years of speculation.
For years, as the child’s bright-eyed face was plastered across Britain’s tabloid press, rumors swirled about her whereabouts and what had happened that night. One British newspaper group later paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in libel damages over stories baselessly throwing suspicion on the girl’s parents. All the while, criticism mounted of the initial botched investigation by the Portuguese police.
Now, the announcement of an official suspect has thrust the case back into the international spotlight. Here is what we know about the recent developments.
The 43-year-old man, whose identity was not immediately released by the police, was named in German press reports on Thursday as Christian B. He lived in Portugal in and around the Algarve region sporadically from 1995 to 2007.
The man, who is in a German prison serving a sentence for an unrelated sexual crime and for drug offenses, has a criminal record for sexual abuse of children, Christian Hoppe, a criminal investigator at Germany’s Federal Criminal Police, said on public television on Wednesday night.
