It has now been a decade since the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and there still are no concrete answers regarding happened to her. The girl’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, are still searching for answers, and they gave an emotional interview about the situation on the 10th anniversary of the night she went missing.
The disappearance of Madeleine McCann happened on May 3, 2007. The little girl, who was 3-years-old at the time, was with her family on vacation in Praia da Luz, Portugal. Gerry and Kate were dining with friends at a tapas bar about 50 yards away from their vacation apartment, notes the Telegraph , and during one of their multiple half-hour checks, they discovered that Madeleine was gone. She was reportedly still in her bed at 9:05 p.m. that night, the family’s twins also sleeping soundly there, and the girl was reported missing at 10:14 p.m.
Gerry and Kate have faced a decade of accusations related to the disappearance of Madeleine, as well as mounds of criticism for dining with friends outside of their rental apartment. The McCanns have always maintained that they have no idea what happened to her, and there has never been any official evidence to the contrary.
The family has maintained that the focus on them by the Portuguese police led to other vital information being lost or missed in the crucial hours after McCann’s disappearance. The apartment was not handled as a crime scene initially, nor were roadblocks put up on neighboring streets until the next morning. In addition, there was not a global missing person report released until five days after McCann’s disappearance.
Many theories have swirled about what happened in the disappearance of Madeleine. There have been some reports of possible sightings of McCann in those early hours where she was missing, and there have been some people sought by authorities who may have been suspects.
The police theorized that Gerry and Kate accidentally killed their daughter by giving her too much of a sedative to make her sleep and that the McCanns covered up the death and faked the abduction. However, in July of 2008, the Portuguese attorney general announced the case was closed and that Kate and Gerry were no longer suspects in Madeleine’s disappearance.
The McCann family is from England, and Scotland Yard continued to investigate the case after the Portuguese police announced they had closed their investigation. The Independent notes that theories aside from the one about Gerry and Kate have included the possibilities that a lone intruder took Madeleine, a burglary gang snatched her, a pedophile took her, or that child traffickers kidnapped the girl. Some have also wondered if the girl simply woke up while her parents were gone, wandered away from the apartment on her own, and somehow went missing that way.
On the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of McCann, Kate and Gerry did an interview with BBC News and noted that they still hold out hope that they can find Madeleine . They talked about how the Metropolitan Police are still working on the case, and that the police have been able to sort through all of the information to narrow down the potential avenues to investigate in relation to the case.
Kate and Gerry add that the head of the investigation, Mark Rowley, has said there is no evidence that the girl is dead or that the McCanns were involved in what happened to her, so they continue to push forward for answers. They say that there is real progress being made even now, and they continue to hold out hope that answers will come. The investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann is authorized to continue for at least several more months, and everybody will be anxious to see if answers will finally emerge.
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