The youngster vanished from Apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort of Praia da Luz, Portugal, just days before her fourth birthday in a case that shook the world. Kate and Gerry McCann were enjoying dinner at a tapas restaurant with seven friends 55 metres away before their lives were turned upside down at 10:30pm on May 3, 2007 – discovering Maddie was not in her bed. The disappearance led to “the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history” and the youngster’s whereabouts is still unknown, despite the Met spending more than £12million on the search under Operation Grange.
Kate and Gerry previously visited Sweden in a bid to raise awareness of the case, appearing on talk show ‘Skavlan,’ where they detailed how they have tried to rebuild their lives.
Speaking to host Fredrik Skavlan in 2014, Kate said: “We reached a new normality, I guess. Life will never be what it was, it’s never going to be truly normal again.
“But we’ve got to a place where we are functioning, Gerry works full-time and I have worked on the campaign and investigation.
“Six months was spent going through the Portuguese police files, nine months was spent writing a book, and, of course, I’ve got two other children.
“It’s quite a nice luxury to be able to take them to school and be there for when they come home.”
But Gerry explained how, even when they appear to be happy, Maddie is still a huge missing part of their family.
He said: “We spend a lot of our spare time focused on it (the investigation), and the last year we slept a lot better knowing that the review was taking place.
“If you, as a casual observer, look at us as a family, you would see a happy family of four.
“You would not suspect that we have suffered a great trauma.
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It came following an appeal for information from British, Portuguese and German police regarding a campervan seen in the area of Praia da Luz around the time of the disappearance and a 30-minute call made to his phone before Maddie vanished.
The development led to three days of relentless searching at a secluded holiday chalet in Seelze, but Maddie was still not found.
This week, it was reported that detectives are now searching for a second German drifter who lived in the Algarve at the time she vanished.
The man, who is thought to have lived in a campervan nine miles from Praia da Luz, is believed to be a former friend of the main suspect but is being treated as a witness.
