MADELEINE McCann’s disappearance sparked one of the biggest missing person hunts in modern history.
She was last seen 12 years ago, here’s everything you need to know about the tragic case.
Madeleine McCann went missing on May 3, 2007, while on holiday in Portugal with her family
How old would Madeleine McCann be now?
Madeleine would now be 19-years-old as of May 2023.
She was born May 12, 2003, and went missing a little more than a week before her fourth birthday.
Her parents, Kate and Gerry, regularly give updates on the website FindMadeleine.com about the latest in the search for Maddie.
The last update they gave was on Madeleine’s birthday on May 12, 2023.
They wrote: “Happy birthday Madeleine! We love you and we’re waiting for you. We’re never going to give up.”
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The pair also shared a photo taken of the tot while on holiday before she vanished.
They captioned the snap: “She’s still missing, still missed and we are never going to give up trying to find her.”
What would Madeleine McCann look like now?
In 2012, police released an image of what Madeleine would look like at the age of nine.
With her distinctive right eye, the image shows the young girl’s face aged about six years from previous photographs.
In December 2021, ex-NHS worker Simone Malik drew up a sketch of what she believes Madeleine McCann would look like at 18-years-old.
Simone, who is also an artist, claims she is a ‘super recogniser’ – a person able to memorise and recall thousands of faces.
In 2018, she played a part in bringing serial killer and rapist Imran Ali to justice in Pakistan.
Simone saw a sketch of the killer, but said it looked nothing like the CCTV image of him.
She then did her own sketch, which was shared widely, and helped Pakistani police to capture him.
Malik believes that her sketch of Maddie can help in the long search.
She said: “I know as a super recogniser that is her face, that’s her nose.”
She added: “Usually, children are like their mother or their father, or a bit of both, but neither does her mother or father have the wide nose and square tip.
“I decided to do a bit more digging, and as I did some digging, I found a very interesting fact: somebody with exactly that nose in her family.
“And it’s actually Philomena McCann, who is Gerry McCann’s sister, so it would be Madeleine’s aunty, from her dad’s side.”
What age was Madeleine McCann when she disappeared?
Madeleine was three, nearly four when she went missing from her family’s holiday flat in Portugal in 2007.
Her parents, Gerry and Kate, had left her sleeping with her siblings while they had dinner at the hotel’s restaurant – only realising at about 10pm that she was gone.
The couple have since devoted their lives to finding the little girl – now left with Maddie’s “Cuddle Cat” as one of the last reminders of their daughter.
More than £13 million has been poured into the investigation for her since 2007.
Could Madeleine McCann still be alive?
Since her disappearance, no one has been able to find Madeleine or conclusive proof she is either dead or alive.
On May 22, 2023, police said they were launching a new search for her body in the first major operation of its kind in nine years.
German cops investigating prime suspect Christian B were set to search a remote Algarve reservoir he is believed to have visited.
It is approximately a 45-minute drive from the Ocean Club holiday resort of Praia da Luz where Maddie vanished.
The area is where there was a sighting of a child being handed to a man days after the three-year-old disappeared.
On April 21, 2022, Portuguese detectives confirmed they had made Christian B an official suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Two years earlier, on June 3, 2020, the German police revealed the child sex offender is the new prime suspect.
Christian Hoppe, from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), said the paedo is serving a prison sentence for a sex crime and has two previous convictions for “sexual contact with girls”.
German newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung reported the suspect was carrying out a seven-year prison sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005.
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He was convicted of the offence in Braunschweig district court in December 2019.
Hoppe said German police have not ruled out a sexual motive for the alleged crime against Madeleine, which is being treated as murder by the BKA.
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