| Madeleine 'paedophile ring' claim |
Published By: Samantha Newman
On Thursday 7 August 2008 |
British police had intelligence that Madeleine McCann could have been snatched by paedophiles.
Official case files reveal someone connected to the ring took a photograph of the little girl on holiday in Portugal and forwarded it to a "purchaser" in Belgium, according to information gathered by the Metropolitan Police.
The intelligence was contained in an email dated March 4 sent to Leicestershire Police and forwarded to Portuguese detectives.
It was in an appendix to a dossier of thousands of pages of police evidence in the Madeleine case made public this week along with CCTV images of possible sightings.
A Met Police staff member wrote in the email: "Intelligence suggests that a paedophile ring in Belgium made an order for a young girl three days before Madeleine McCann was taken.
"Somebody connected to this group saw Maddie, took a photograph of her and sent it to Belgium. The purchaser agreed that the girl was suitable and Maddie was taken."
The source of the intelligence was anonymous and it is not clear how reliable it was.
The news comes as the McCanns' private detectives shift the focus of the search for Madeleine to Amsterdam after it emerged a second witness reported seeing her in the Dutch city.
Hannie Wiechmann, 71, called police after seeing a child she believed to be the missing girl in May last year, but officers dismissed her concerns.
Anna Stam, 41, had already said she reported speaking to a little girl who came into her Amsterdam party shop with a man, a woman and two other children.
She said the girl called herself Maddie and stated: "They took me from my holiday."
Asked about the woman accompanying her, the child replied: "She is not my mummy. She is a stranger, she took me from my mummy."
