Family has new hope, says Madeleine grandmother
A new lead in the search for Madeleine McCann has given her family new hope, her grandmother said today.
Investigators last week issued an e-fit of a woman described as an Australian Victoria Beckham lookalike, who reportedly asked a witness if he was there to deliver her “new daughter” just days after the little girl’s disappearance.
They are said to have received hundreds of calls from the public and been given dozens of possible names since then.
Madeleine’s grandmother Susan Healey told Hello! magazine: “Kate and Gerry (Madeleine’s parents) are usually very measured about new ’evidence’, but this has given us all renewed hope.”
The family had “good days and bad days”, she added.
“Although we try to be hopeful, there are times when we think: ’But it’s been such a long time’,” she said. “Sometimes it feels almost unbearable. Then there’s a new lead or clue, or you hear about another child that went missing who’s been found alive and it gives you a lift. News of missing children being found safe and well years later has helped Kate and Gerry remain positive too.”
Kate McCann would find it especially hard when Madeleine’s younger brother and sister, twins Sean and Amelie, start school in September, her mother told the magazine.
“That’s going to be such a hard milestone for Kate. Madeleine had been due to start shortly after she was taken,” she said.
But the family would not give up hope while there was no proof Madeleine was dead, she added.
“We just have to keep hoping like hell. There’s no alternative,” she said. “Unless you have proof that a child is no longer alive you can’t stop. We won’t stop until we know where our little Madeleine is.”
Madeleine was nearly four when she went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve on May 3, 2007 while her parents dined with friends nearby.
Just more than 72 hours later, in the early hours of May 7, two British men saw the Victoria Beckham lookalike while on a night out in the popular Port Olimpic Marina in Barcelona.
After speaking to one of the witnesses the woman went into a bar next door, where she had a heated conversation with a local in what seemed to be fluent Spanish.
The search for Madeleine was focused on Australia today after a Sydney woman provided a formal statement to detectives at a Sydney police station.
New South Wales Police Force said she had claimed to know the identity of the woman being sought.
