Police still hope to find missing British girl alive after 5 years

British police investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old who went missing in Portugal five years ago sparking a global hunt, still hope to find her alive, the officer leading the inquiry said on Wednesday.

Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood told reporters police have identified 195 “investigative opportunities” from existing evidence that have been handed to Portuguese police.

Some, he said, included new information.

Police have released an age-enhanced image of Madeleine, as she would look today, aged nine years old.

Clarence Mitchell, the spokesman for Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry McCann, said the new image has filled the family with hope.

“They are positive when they see it,” Mitchell said. “So the family will draw great strength from this. They do see it as positive and they are hoping and praying, as they have been for five years, that this will lead to that breakthrough and that somebody somewhere will recognize her and she will still be able to come home.”

Madeleine disappeared from her family’s holiday apartment in the resort of Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007, prompting a massive police probe and a search that gripped media across the world.

She went missing while her parents Kate and Gerry were dining at a nearby restaurant with seven friends.

Despite numerous reported sightings from Belgium and Spain to Morocco, France and Malta and investigations stretching as far as Australia, her whereabouts remain a mystery.

The McCanns were named as official suspects by Portuguese police four months after their daughter’s disappearance but in 2008 they were cleared and Portugal’s public prosecutor later dropped the case citing a lack of any evidence.

The McCanns had won 550,000 pounds ($875,000) in damages from two British newspapers who suggested they had killed Madeleine, while their friends — known as the “Tapas 7” — also won large payouts over claims they had lied about the abduction.

Last year, the McCanns wrote to British Prime Minister David Cameron saying neither the British nor Portuguese officials were doing enough to find their daughter and that only private investigators they had hired were still following their case.

Cameron subsequently ordered a new probe by London police who are working through 40,000 pieces of material and documents.

“At the moment, we have identified, a quarter of the way through, 195 investigative opportunities which cross a whole range of subjects,” said Detective Chief Inspector Redwood. “Some of the answers could be very simple, some are more complex. And also within that we are currently developing new material which we believe represents genuine new information.”

Redwood, who has been to Portugal seven times on the case, declined to give details about any possible suspects, or sightings, although he said these form part of the new findings.

He said he would not be drawn on any hypothesis of where Madeleine might be if alive and that police were giving equal weight in their review to the notion she was dead.

Any formal decision to reopen the case would have to be taken by Portugal.

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