Police scour bank CCTV after Madeleine spotted by guard Daily Express
By John Chapman and Mark Reynolds
Saturday August 9, 2008
Poilce were last
night trawling through CCTV images from a Belgian bank as the parents of Madeleine McCann were given fresh hope that she could
be found.
A blonde, blue-eyed girl who
looked "much like" Madeleine was spotted in the bank in Brussels on Monday morning this week.
An eagle-eyed member
of staff saw the youngster in the company of a woman of North African appearance.
Crucially, the sighting came before the 30,000-page Portuguese police file on the case was released later
on Monday and explains why it is being treated so seriously.
It emerged last night that the bank official who suspected the little girl was Madeleine is a male security
officer who monitors the branch’s CCTV images.
A police source said: "He is convinced he saw Madeleine but obviously it needs checking out carefully. We
have been in this position before and we don’t want to make any mistakes."
Detectives are not revealing the name of the witness or the location of the branch, apart from saying
it is a KBC Bank in west Brussels.
A Belgian police spokesman said: "We always take these reports seriously and are looking into the matter.
"A worker in the bank saw a North African woman with a young blonde girl with blue eyes. The child was
said to be much like Madeleine."
Belgium's sordid history of sex crimes and paedophile rings is now firmly under the spotlight amid concerns
that she was stolen to order by child sex perverts.
Interpol officials in Brussels have received 107 reports of "sightings" since she vanished while on holiday
with her family in Portugal on May 3 last year.
Thirty-six were investigated, 34 were deemed too vague and 37 came from clairvoyants.
Private detectives working for Kate and Gerry McCann, from Rothley, Leicestershire, are to check out the
most credible sightings.
The McCanns' family spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said the couple's investigators welcomed information
about all possible sightings but were most interested in recent reports.
He urged people with information to pass on any leads to the detectives using the contact numbers on the
McCanns' website, www.findmadeleine.com. Mr Mitchell said: "The critical information they really need is recent sightings."
A Scotland Yard intelligence report sent to Portuguese police warned that Madeleine had been targeted
by a Belgian child sex gang. But they admitted the report from a secret source "may have been wrong."
The police files from Portugal revealed a spate of sightings in Belgium last summer.
On May 15, music journalist Line Compere reported seeing the youngster with an Eastern European couple
on a tram.
She told the Daily Express: "I keep playing the moment over and over in my mind. Could that girl have
been Madeleine? In any case, I have little doubt that this child had been kidnapped."
Ms Compere, 31, added: "We were on the Number 18 tram from Porte d’Anderlecht going towards the
Gare du Midi. They got off and then got on to the number 51 tram.
"She really looked like Madeleine, but her hair was different. In the photos I saw of Madeleine, she had
a fringe, but this girl did not. She was dressed all in pink and was in a pushchair.
"I was standing close to her and saw her eyes – they were blue. But I did not notice any marking
on her eye. She was with a man and a woman, both between 35 and 40. They were white but had dark hair and looked Eastern European.
They were both dressed in dark clothes. The girl looked very different to the adults. I was interviewed by Belgian police
who launched an inquiry, and I gave them all the details I knew."
Ms Compere said she saw the girl 12 days after three-year-old Madeleine disappeared in Praia da Luz.
She told police her suspicions were aroused because the man and woman with the youngster did not look
like her, appeared to be speaking a different language and did not seem to know her well.
At this point she had never seen a picture of Madeleine, but later that day she was shown a photograph
of the missing girl, according to the files.
Ms Compere told police in her interview on June 1 last year: "When I saw the photo it immediately jumped
out to me that there was a big resemblance to the little girl on the tram."
Later that month a Briton saw a youngster asleep on a train travelling from Brussels to Antwerp.
He said the child could have been drugged.
In June, Belgian-born Gilles Crippiau said he saw a girl looking like Madeleine in a town near the French
border.
A Dutch witness, 41-year-old mother-of-one Anna Stam, has met the McCanns' spokesman Mr Mitchell and helped
to draw an artist's impression of the people she believes she saw with the missing child.
She claims a girl calling herself Maddie was in her shop accompanied by a "strange" family.
The sketches show a dark-featured man with a moustache in his late 30s, who was speaking Portuguese,
and a brown-haired woman in her 40s talking French.
Ms Stam was approached by the young girl who asked her in unaccented English: "Do you know where my mummy
is?"
When Ms Stam told the girl her mother was in the store, the child replied: "She is not my mummy," adding
"She is a stranger, she took me from my mummy."
Ms Stam said she thought that the girl looked "very much like" Madeleine, apart from the colour of her
hair.
