A year ago it was claimed Madeleine McCann may have died in the Portuguese holiday apartment she was sleeping in, but there is no evidence to suggest these claims have been investigated.
Criminal investigator Moita Flores, who was once attached to the Policia Judiciaria involved in the search for Madeleine, attempted to dampen the theory that she was abducted from the apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve.
He told Portuguese website Flash! it would have been ‘impossible to get through a window with a child’ and said he had ‘no doubt’ Kate and Gerry McCann’s daughter had died in the apartment.
Madeleine, who was three-years-old at the time, disappeared on May 3, 2007, while her parents were having dinner at a tapas bar in the resort just 55 metres away.
On holiday with her parents and her two-year-old twin siblings, she and the twins had been left asleep at 8.30pm in a ground-floor apartment.
The couple checked on the children throughout the evening, before discovering their eldest child was missing around 10pm.
Flore’s comments came as police were on the look-out for an Algarve resort worker they believe has clues about her disappearance.
Detectives believe the worker ‘kept secrets’ from them in the initial investigation almost 11 years ago.
In February 2017, investigative journalist Mark Williams-Thomas told This Morning he believed Maddie woke up in the middle of the night and went to look for her parents, leaving the apartment through an ‘insecure’ back door.
Launched in May 2011, Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange is an ongoing investigative review into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
The review was launched after the original Portuguese investigation received heavy criticism from British Authorities.
More than £11 million has been spent on the operation to find Maddie, and last month, the Metropolitan police asked the Home Office for more funding to continue their investigations.
Funding for Operation Grange is regularly reviewed, last receiving a £154,000 extension in September 2017, writes the Guardian.
There is a team of four police detectives – down from 29 in 2015 – who continue to investigate Madeleine’s disappearance.
In a statement, a Home Office spokesperson said:
The Home Office has provided funding to the Metropolitan police for Operation Grange and the resources required are reviewed regularly with careful consideration given before any new funding is allocated.
Scotland Yard has received some criticism from the general public regarding the highly funded Operation Grange.
Some people believe the Madeleine McCann investigation continues to take precedence over the cases of other missing and vulnerable children, whose stories remain under-discussed and under-investigated.
One person tweeted, ‘It’s terribly sad what happened to Madeleine McCann but millions of other children have gone missing and had no funding’.
Another said, ‘I can’t believe the Madeleine McCann search is yet again being funded more money. Why? What about all the other missing children/people?’
Hopefully, one day, there will be answers.
