Missing: Madeleine McCann

On the evening of Thursday the 3rd of May 2007, a British couple on holiday in the resort of Praia da Luz on Portugal's Algarve coast finished dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant, roughly 50 metres from the ground-floor apartment where their three children were sleeping. Kate and Gerry McCann had, over the course of the evening, taken turns checking on the children at approximately half-hour intervals. Their eldest daughter, three-year-old Madeleine, was in the front bedroom with her two-year-old twin siblings. At approximately 10:00 pm, Kate McCann returned to Apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort for her turn to check. She walked through the unlocked patio door. She looked into the children's bedroom. The twins were still asleep. Madeleine's bed was empty. The window in the room was open. Nineteen years later, Madeleine McCann has never been found. Portuguese police initially treated the case as an abduction, then as a homicide, then closed it, then reopened it. Kate and Gerry McCann were themselves named as formal suspects, then cleared. Multiple men have been investigated over the years, including a German convicted paedophile named Christian Brueckner, who remains the primary suspect of German prosecutors. The case has generated more media coverage than any missing child case in modern European history. The story of the little girl who vanished from Apartment 5A, of the parents whose lives were destroyed by the search for her, and of a mystery that, at the time of this recording, has still never been solved.

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