POLICE INTERVIEWED a woman on Monday who lives in the apartment above the one from where Madeleine disappeared at the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz, according to reports in the Portuguese national press on Wednesday.
Pamela Fenn, aged 70, allegedly said that she heard Madeleine calling out for her father the night before she disappeared. She had been interviewed at the start of the investigation and police called her back this week to provide more details about what she heard, including a conversation which she had with Kate McCann on the night Madeleine disappeared.
It is said that Pamela Fenn had offered to call the police when they discovered that Madeleine was missing but Kate told her that the alert had already been raised.
Gerry McCann told Spanish newspapers that he still believes there is a “reasonable chance” that Madeleine is still alive and they would continue to look for her.
The British media has reported that Portuguese police have advised the McCanns not to leave the country for the time being and there is speculation that a breakthrough in the case could occur soon at the same time that reports surfaced about all judicial police officers’ leave being cancelled until further notice.
Portuguese authorities have still not received DNA test results from the UK. These follow the discovery of specks of blood in the McCanns’ holiday apartment.
Following speculation earlier this week that British police are planning to arrest a friend of the McCann family, Judicial Police (PJ) spokesperson Olegário Sousa told Portuguese news agency Lusa that this information “does not make any sense”.
The fund set up by Kate and Gerry McCann has topped £1m (1.5 million euros). In his blog on the official campaign website, www.findmadeleine.com, Gerry says: “Madeleine’s fund allows us to make decisions regarding our search for Madeleine for the right reasons – with the board’s approval of course – and not out of financial necessity.”
A girl at a roadside cafe in the eastern Belgian town of Tongeren, thought to have been missing Madeleine, has been confirmed as Sjanneke Hofstede, the four-year-old
 Sjanneke Hofstede |  |
daughter of a Belgian man from Hoogstraten.
Madeleine McCann’s parents have been visited by the brother of murdered Iraq hostage Ken Bigley. Phil Bigley met the couple in Portugal at the weekend to discuss the trauma of having a close relative kidnapped.
The British advertising watchdog has rejected complaints from parents about a cinema commercial highlighting the disappearance of Madeleine. The advertisement was shown before the U-rated film Shrek the Third and prompted 22 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) from people who said the commercial was distressing and unsuitable to be shown with a U-rated film in cinemas. The ASA said the film was not sensationalist and did not contain any distressing images.
A study conducted on behalf of the Find Madeleine campaign revealed that 97 per cent of European Parliament members said that there should be an EU-wide sex offenders register. It also showed that 95 per cent of EU Parliament members believe that police should treat serious crimes involving children in exactly the same way across Europe.
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